When Arbouretum first formed, in 2002, they offered dusty, dimly-lit folk rock that suggested a less mysterious Califone-- muffled drums, Appalachian finger-picking, tape hiss, dark intimations in the lyrics. As time wore on, their sound sprouted psych-rock fuzz, which has since spread like kudzu to overtake everything. On The Gathering, their fourth full-length, there is precious little evidence of their former shimmering acoustic beauty. The only signal that we are dealing with the same group comes from their undimmed, aching sincerity. This quality that once led them to burden an otherwise lovely song with the lumpen title "People Flock Not to the Good" now has lead singer Dave Heumann delivering brutal lines like these from a Jimmy Webb cover, "I was a highwayman/ Along the coach roads I did ride," with a straight face. This stiffness wasn't a problem as long as their music provided nuance and shading. On The Gathering, though, the sonic vista is flattened out, resulting in a dreary, grayscale trudge of an album.
It's a shame, because Arbouretum show signs that they could be a great desert-rock band if they loosened up. The churning Foghat riffs on opener "The White Bird" evoke the right time period and headspace, and the pleasantly noodling guitar solos induce the proper middle-distance head-nod. Heumann's voice, traveling somewhere between Jim James' "Bermuda Highway" and Scott Weiland's "Interstate Love Song", enters high and hearty in the mix, and the song cruises weightlessly along its proscribed path for seven minutes. Everything is, momentarily, in its right place.
Unfortunately, things quickly plummet off a cliff from there. The fuzz-rock trance Arbouretum are aiming to induce needs groove to sustain it; groove, in turn, demands flexibility. And, well, you don't get much more rigidly inflexible of an on-record presence than Dave Heumann is here. With his strident vocals and leaden phrasing, he lends all the swagger [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| of a Calvinist preacher to the proceedings, and the effect is like Kryptonite to the groove. "There is a righteous band that's marching/ They're beating drums and even speaking in tongues/ They're passing plates along/ Clothed in garments of the sun," he quavers on "Destroying to Save". Time and time again, he hits his point so squarely on the nose that it hurts-- I know they're called Arbouretum and all, but did he really need to sing "Let's go inside the forest?"
Sincerity, by itself, is no musical sin. But it makes a pretty egregious mismatch to the music Arbouretum have found themselves making. Queens of the Stone Age, masters of the bleary desert-rock form, found the perfect mantra to complement their sun-baked throb on "Walking on Sidewalks"; "I wish we could get away/ Drink wine and screw." Sloganeering over this stuff just produces headaches and squinting. No one likes to be hectored when they're trying to bliss out. Arbouretum were once a very good folk-rock outfit; they might want to consider calming down, or unplugging.
