Bloomington duo Stagnant Pools, comprising Bryan and Douglass Enas, can now finally go out on tour after having just graduated from Indiana University. While that's clearly a definitive event for someone in his early 20s, I'm hesitant to think of it defining Stagnant Pools as artists-- though they do come off like college kids on Temporary Room, though the pre-internet kind: still impressionable enough to be completely blown away by an older band with a single idea. Remember the old Chris Rock bit where he ate broccoli and cheese for the first time as a kid and thought he'd want nothing but that for the rest of his life? Replace "broccoli" with "Jesus" and "cheese" with "Mary Chain" and you're getting close to the charmingly monomaniacal focus Stagnant Pools bring to their debut, Temporary Room.
Stagnant Pools also have the youthful tendency to get canonical with their influences-- JAMC, Joy Division, and Echo and the Bunnymen are their preferred forefathers. However, I don't see Stagnant Pools putting the same emphasis on non-musical aesthetic or sneer; they register more in the style of bands that felt less like post-punk and more like post-9/11 artists such as Snowden or Calla, or a far less fashionable Interpol. What I mean by that is Stagnant Pools' expertise during this early juncture is conveying an atmosphere of youthful, cosmopolitan dejection that feels metaphysically confirmed by our national mood. While engrossing as a full-length experience, at anything less than knee-buckling volumes, Temporary Room feels utterly impenetrable, nearly ambient. The constant whorl of distortion and Bryan's droning vocals leave Temporary Room hovering like a coal-black cloud on a hot day. The guitars are almost all sustain and decay, leaving the attack and release for Douglass' active drums, and often he does comply: "Dead Sailor" and "Dreaming of You" bash away like the Strokes raised on Midwestern disappointment rather than NYC entitlement, and there's enough hi-hat jittering on "Frozen" to make their opening gig for Maxïmo Park not as bizarre as it might initially appear.
And really, Temporary Room is more interesting than you might get from simply surveying the elements that underpin most of the songs here-- chords almost never change between bars, the vocal melodies have the elasticity to stretch out over three-syllable words or phrases like "devastate" or "maze of graves," the rhythms are heavy on splash cymbals and snares. The choruses are often a minor variation on the verse, a dour intonation of the title-- once these songs get going, they're like a large sailboat, not going fast per se, but only capable of making incremental changes in course. Bryan's vocals are also something of a paradox-- he's a classic mumbler, so how does he still manage to always make himself heard over music that's meant to be played loud as fuck? There might be a Mark Lanegan-like growler trying to escape the rubble, as his melodies sound weathered and worn by truth, meant to inspire a slow nod in agreement rather than a singalong. Truth be told, it might just be a band utilizing the rules of slowcore and the velocity of punk.
Sound good to you? If so, Temporary Room will too because it's so bent on establishing that one single mood that you tend to gloss over the individual song titles. They're here for a reason, though: "Stun", "Frozen", "Dreaming of You", "Illusions". So really, it's not a sound or even a feeling that Temporary Room advances as much as a disposition that's encoded in the song with the most self-fulfilling title of all: "Consistency".
