Athens, Georgia is the place to be if you're in the junk business. The tiny college town an hour east of Atlanta hosts a legion of musician-tinkerers eager to scrounge through junkyards and scrap-heaps looking for raw materials with which to build their elaborate noisemaking contraptions.
Empire State-- comprised of brothers Jay and Tim Nackashi, who are also in Beekeeper, and Alex McManus, a sideman with Vic Chesnutt, Lambchop, and Simon Joyner-- is one such group of Athenian junk junkies, specializing in refurbished vintage keyboards and bizarre (-looking and -sounding) percussion devices. But they don't stop there, just throwing together throwing a bunch of other people's refuse and calling it a day. Instead, they actually write some pretty decent pop songs to go along with their mechanical inclinations, and for the most part, they successfully combine the two elements, and even throw in a healthy dose of electronics on top to keep things interesting.
Sure, sometimes the combination sounds overly forced, and Empire State comes off as a little schizophrenic, seemingly unable to decide whether to be an indie rock band or an electronic group. But after listening to the handful of outright successes on Eternal Combustion, Empire State's second full-length release, it's easy to understand the band's indecision.
Eternal Combustion starts off with the instrumental "Soaked," which weds the seemingly disparate sounds of Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine" with your standard trombone-driven Souza march, forming into a album intro that's hard to resist. This leads into "Explode," which chronicles just that: emotionally cutting loose and raging against a immanently bleak future ("It's okay and it's alright to explode"). The song subtly hints at a theme that's spelled out in greater detail with "Bugs in the System" and the album's standout track, "Bleeps and the Blips," namely the tension between Man and Machine. It's a theme that's underscored by the interplay between the electronic/mechanical aspects of the band and the more organic sounds played by traditional instruments.
"Bleeps and the Blips" is the closest thing to an anthem you get with Eternal Combustion, and, ironically, one the least electronically enhanced songs on the album. On it, the band does their best Jayhawks impression without sounding too derivative, while McManus sings, "All the seconds and sixths will make you crazy when your brain is squeezed like a sponge full of grease it's removing your memories."
Later, with "Don't Disturb Us," Empire State strongly recall one of the bands that made technological alienation their stock and trade: Devo. The first time I heard this song, I actually checked the liner notes to see if it was a cover of a Devo song with which I wasn't familiar. It's a catchy, fast-paced synth romp that brings the album to a peak before its finale, the languid Beach Boys-meets-Smog ballad, "A Final Day."
It'll be interesting to see what direction Empire State takes next-- whether they'll move toward strictly electronic territory or retreat back toward the kind of indie rock stuff they seem to have a mastery over already. Hopefully, they'll further deepen this middle road they've carved out, further blurring the seam between organic and electronic/mechanical, and keep digging around the back alleys of Athens for a hubcap that makes that specific sound they all hear in their heads.
