The Pica Beats' Ryan Barrett, a New Englander transplanted to the Pacific Northwest, sounds downright bummed to have come late to so many different parties. You can hear it in his fragile, warbly voice, if not always his somewhat glum songs. Strummy naïve C-86, lo-fi DIY, hyper-literate heart-on-sleeve twee-- oh, to have been born too late to partake in those forgiving and nurturing scenes while they were still alive and strong!
Needless to say, the Pica Beats seem a little out of place in 2008, if not outright anachronistic in their stylistic leanings (and borrowings). Yet despite this, there's such a relatively unassuming vibe running throughout their second album Beating Back the Claws of the Cold that it makes up for the fact the antecedents are so easy to discern. It sure helps that the band doesn't seem so bigheaded that it pumps up its low-key geek rock with misplaced portent. Instead, they are innocuously slack where other acts might have gone for wound-up. The rickety anti-sheen of the basement studio production gives the disc the feeling of something homemade and defensively modest, a token the shy new kid at school might slip into the lockers of potentially likeminded peers by way of indirect introduction.
That's the good news. The bad is that diffidence can only get you so far, and however fine a handful of individual songs may be here, the comprehensive end result is still oddly lifeless. Mellow might be the name of the game, but you can still sell songs with some conviction and spark without coming across as overconfident. There's a middle ground to be reached that's missed by the OK-enough title track or the otherwise standout "Summer Cutting Kale", which is just slightly more subdued than it needed to be to take advantage of the inner anthem waiting to emerge.
Even the few more vibrant tunes, like "Shrinking Violets" or "Cognac & Rum", fall just short of all they could be, with the theatricality of the latter in particular failing to bring Barrett's narrative into sharper focus . Elsewhere, the occasional use of synths-- or, on the instrumental "Martine, As Heavy Lifter" and "Hikkomori & The Rental Sisters", sitar-- seems less novel than frivolous, while songs such as "Shallow Dive" and "Poor Old Ra" never quite justify the flowery, erudite logorrhea they're meant to support. Smug though the band may be, at least the Decemberists deliver their literariness dynamically. With the Pica Beats, it's harder to connect with Barrett's characters and colorful descriptors when the songs themselves never quite fully come to life.
This is not to say Barrett and friends don't sound like they could be on the cusp of something a little more self-assured, but that's just it: Beating Back the Claws of the Cold only offers fleeting glimpses of potential greatness beneath the ho-hum surface. Right now the band (itself a relatively fresh and untested expansion on Barrett's originally solo conceit) comes off a tentative work in progress as well, a little too ensconced in its own little cocoon, in no particular hurry to get out.
