Jonah Matranga, the only true member of Portland, Oregon's Onelinedrawing, is a diarist at heart, both in his music and in his daily life. He offers reflections on the recording of his third full-length that run longer than the printed lyrics in the liners and, man, does he ever rip his heart out and show it to you in his songs. Matranga developed this habit with emo punks Far, but he's refined it on his own, developing a loose, free-roaming approach to confessional songwriting that pushes his music beyond the normal sad-sack singer/songwriter clichés.
The Volunteers comes packaged in artwork that suggests Stephen Foster and the Civil War era more than the modern grab-bag it actually contains, and Matranga's liners are a good stream-of-consciousness accompaniment to the music, which opens with a plinking xylophone and ghostly female vocals before giving over to "Over It", a sing-along anthem which casts the personal struggle of the lyrics in a strange light. Like most of the songs that follow, "Over It" moves from section to section seemingly when it occurs to Matranga to switch things up; there's no traditional verse/chorus/verse structure to anything here.
The meat of the album is primarily in the middle, though, as tracks three through seven swerve all over the road finding different ways to toy with emotions. "A Ghost" follows a dead man as he watches his wife and son go on living, drifting through the door of his wife's bus and floating above the seats, and builds to a majestic conclusion wrapped in a warm blanket of synth. Matranga's voice gets breathy and relaxed while hovering around Chad Waldrup's layers of spacious guitar on "Stay", the melody wrapping around the simple lyrics for the album's most transcendent moment. But he's back to his normal croak when he opens "We Had a Deal" with the couplet, "I had a deal with Heaven, but it fell through/ I had a dream or seven and I'm not sure which one came true." The most infectious song on the album is actually a joke-- Matranga wrote "Oh, Boys" for his girlfriend after damaging her car, and the vocal round of "boys keep fuckin' up my car" in the outro is hilarious.
For its peaks, though, The Volunteers does have its lows, and it more or less trails off in the last quarter, especially with "Portland?", a revisitation of the album intro that consists mostly of a sample of a gas pump and some wandering keyboards. It fades into near-silence for too long before "As Much to Myself as to You" strikes up to close out the album with its solo acoustic lament, a serviceable folk tune with some nice couplets, but a limp melody. But even while it's unfortunately anticlimatic, The Volunteers is a fine record, and a welcome addition to the modern singer/songwriter canon.
