Vermont duo the Vacant Lots have been co-signed by Suicide's Alan Vega. Their debut album Departure was mixed by Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom and features guitar work from Galaxie 500's Dean Wareham. They were brought on tour with the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Frontman Jared Artaud just released a poetry book, and if his last name seems familiar, it's because he cribbed it from the French poet Antonin Artaud. When they perform, psychedelic images are projected onto to the band. Their new album's companion tape Arrival features artwork by Anthony Ausgang, who did the cover of MGMT's Congratulations. The "cool factor" with this band is palpable, even it's largely been attained through nostalgic associations.
After the promising 2011 single "Confusion", the trick for the Vacant Lots is to add authority to their psychedelic street cred with a solid album. Departure, a record bogged down in repetitive melodies, doesn't get there. The album opens with a bleating, attention-grabbing synth hook on "Mad Mary Jones", but you won't find many aberrations or change-ups beyond that. Even when percussion and guitar come in to take the song in a new direction, it becomes another unvarying parallel road alongside that initial synth refrain. Most of these songs follow a hook a little too far and, sometimes, like on "Paint This City", they slog through slower, still repetitive material. The vocals, often monotonous with several choruses only offering a handful of repeated and deadpanned words, don't help. At times, Artaud recites the lyrics, slow and drab, as poems. They may read well on the page, but as songs, they come over as hollow psychedelic blather, with lines like, "The void filled by a penetrating eye with an electric pupil."
Still, this album can't be written off purely as a repetitive mess—this is the sound they were going for, after all, and when they rely less heavily on repetition, drones, and electronics, they find some decent material. Take the tambourine on "Before the Evening's Thru", which roots them in an earlier era of psychedelia. It's a small thing, but the percussion pairs well with their persistent electronic warble, which is mixed and mastered beautifully by Sonic Boom. And it was a great call to get Wareham on guitar for "Tomorrow", which has one of the album's best hooks and, following the verse, a fantastic shift in texture that brings to mind Michael Rother or Utopia-era Todd Rundgren. But those occasional flare-ups and moments of potential are exceptions on an album that needs anything to happen more frequently.
