"Take me," Andrew Rieger growls, T.Rex-style, on the title track of Elf Power's sixth album, Walking with the Beggar Boys, before launching into a garish, grating, noisy, psychedelic guitar solo that's completely out of sync with the song's trippily organic pop. It's a mercifully short sojourn-- only a few measures-- and the only thing that keeps it from completely derailing the song is Reiger's pleasant call-and-response with special guest Vic Chesnutt. That outlandish break in the song, however, is symptomatic of Elf Power's new dilemma: whether to move forward with a brighter, more streamlined sound that incorporates 70s-style rock, or to hang on to the Elephant 6 lo-fi of previous albums like A Dream in Sound and When the Red King Comes. The band's decision: to attempt to split the difference, a resolution that begets a cluttered, sometimes unfocused result.
Like their Elephant 6 siblings Olivia Tremor Control, Elf Power have always played with sounds: Their songs sometimes veer into cacophonous digressions or whimsically switch genres like bored children. This off-the-cuff approach lent albums like A Dream in Sound an appropriately dreamlike quality, and was intrinsic to the group's shaggy-haired pop, which seemed to thrive on such capriciousness. However, in updating their approach, Elf Power can't make the sonics match up to the songs, and as such, all these elements can do is intrude and interrupt. The folksy verses of "Drawing Flies" don't quite jibe with the metal chorus of fuzzed-over uh-huh's and oh-oh's, and "The Cracks", with its murky programmed drums and deathly tone, mires the album's middle with its drudgy dirge.
It doesn't help that Walking with the Beggar Boys isn't the band's best collection of tunes. The most striking melody here, on "Evil Eye", is snatched from Richard Thompson's "Wall of Death", and few others are very memorable. An ambitious songwriter, Rieger still flirts with high-minded tedium, often dragging out hazy metaphors or vague motifs over several verses, if not through entire songs. "The Stranger" hinges on a lucid-dream account of meeting "a stranger who stopped me in the street/ He told me love was in his head and then he ceased to be/ Yeah, when I looked the other way he'd split himself in two." Unless you're a paid psychoanalyst, listening to other people describe their dreams, as the saying goes, is wearisome.
Walking with the Beggar Boys sounds askew, a puzzle whose pieces don't fit properly. This sort of disjointedness can sometimes make for intriguing work, but here it just feels obligatory and slightly stunted. Obviously, Elf Power intend Walking with the Beggar Boys to be their Isolation Drills: the step from lo- to hi-fi, a means to develop a slightly new sound and secure a bit of career longevity. Such aims are understandable and even admirable, but it's a difficult to walk with anyone who has one foot so firmly planted in the past.
