If I'm being generous, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson's second LP is a purple-prosed, passionate, and yet self-aware love letter to the musician's formative influences. Summer of Fear, a breakup album, streams like an hour-plus-long AOR-radio rock block, trafficking in strong, self-righteous, juvenile emotion, frustrated desire, and frequent, crashing instrumental climax. Robinson calls out specific heroes like Tom Petty (recasting "the waiting is the hardest part" as "the whole thing is the hardest part"), Bruce Springsteen (appropriating the Boss' fist-pounding "hey"! to launch riff-rafting, piano-slamming, sax-soloing ephiphanies), and Bob Dylan (adopting just about every nasal, marble-mouthed vocal trick). Love makes you do strange things.
I'm trying to cut Robinson a break because I liked his 2008 self-titled debut, a bleak, disheveled, and frequently wonderful record produced by Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor. That album came together in a couple of weeks in someone's Brooklyn living room, and despite its emotionally fraught preoccupations with addiction, homelessness, and other dead-end, drain-circling scenarios, it sounded lived-in and loose, thanks to the players' casual noise-folk jamming and Robinson's flair for leavening grim scenes with wry humor (best lines: "Hey boy you're a death head/ I bet you'd be alright in bed/ Still I'll take sleep instead").
Fear, on the other hand, is a clusterfuck of bad pacing, pretentious lyrics histrionically sung, and overseasoned arrangements boiled to a gray mush. Robinson and producer Kyp Malone enjoyed 50 days in the studio (recording it before Robinson's first album was even released), and their shared affection for the classic rock canon, 1970s soul and funk, and complex sonics could have yielded something pretty great instead of the hot mess on hand. "Hard Row" makes as good (or bad) a case as any, starting spare and promising with a tight-snapping beat and pulsing guitar, only to slam into a brick wall of sneering synths, lyrics like, "Honey, it's a hard row/ And it's one that you have to hoe" (both the Black Keys and OutKast have deployed that awful aphorism to much sharper effect), and, finally, a pumping organ line with all the verve of a carnival carousel's. Then again, you don't know how unfocused this record is until you study "Death by Dust"'s template, in which a modest Americana ramble segues into a noisy art-guitar solo, then yields to a full orchestra of brass, woodwinds, and the inevitable swooping, valedictory strings. If you happen to like its teeth-clenched, tears-streaming, utterly unearned ending, "Always an Anchor", "The Sound", "The 100th of March", and "Summer of Fear, Pt. 2" all repeat the trick.
The album's not a complete wash. When Robinson hews to his fine melodies and checks his more baroque and myopic fan-boy impulses, he gets something like the enjoyable "Trap Door" or populist handclapper "Losing 4 Winners". But for the most part, the over-styled Fear repudiates Robinson's low-key and actually good debut, which he's now downplaying as a demo never intended for release. Word of advice: Save excuses like that for records that aren't so hot. This one, for example.
