Boston-area trio Gem Club’s 2011 full-length debut Breakers was mostly recorded in lead vocalist/songwriter Christopher Barnes’ bedroom, and that sort of claustrophobic intimacy was reflected in its narrow stylistic range and Barnes’ minimal arrangements. Breakers was an album of cool, spartan chamber-pop that relied heavily on the use of space to suggest distance and introspection.
New album In Roses goes in a different direction: leaving the familiar terrain of Barnes’ living quarters, the band recorded in California, where they worked out of indie rock journeyman John Vanderslice’s San Francisco studio with local producer Minna Choi. The change of scenery and major upgrade in fidelity is immediately evident; this is a much warmer, richer album than its predecessor, and Barnes’ compositions swell and take new shape from the heat. “Michael” drips with the gentle, starlit romanticism of the Antlers; epic closer “Polly” blooms with the help of a softly rolling organ riff that’s ripped straight from Beach House’s playbook. Throughout the album, strings swoop and flit around with a lightness that’s a world away from the mostly solemn cello melodies found on Breakers.
Barnes also takes major vocal and lyrical steps forward. With the help of vocalist Ieva Berberian, he alternates between swaddling his voice in gauzy layers of harmony (“Idea for Strings”) and sprinkling bright flecks of sound around his lead takes, both new wrinkles to his arrangements. And then there's his newfound lyrical focus and clarity. Much of In Roses grapples with queerness in an honest, emotionally unvarnished fashion, whether through explicit nods to old idols—like the aching, mournful “Soft Season”, an ode to the influential gay porn star and ultimate drug overdose victim Joey Stefano—or raw self-examinations like the aforementioned “Michael”, a requiem for a dead relationship that climaxes with Barnes watching his love physically fading away: “I can see it in your eyes/ It’s in your back, your chest/ It’s emotion rise/ It’s the color back/ I can feel it.” His bruising tenderness pairs well with the album’s poignant orchestration, and his perspective is refreshing and welcome among standard and plentiful heterosexual narratives.
While In Roses is a collection of very successful variations on a theme, it doesn’t represent an uptick in Gem Club’s versatility or range. The band may be employing a more varied palette than on previous listeners, but they rarely break from their basic template of vocals-piano-strings, and save perhaps “Michael” the album doesn’t hold the sort of instantly indelible melodies that might pull new or casual listeners into the band’s sphere. Still, the new splashes of color are welcome, and they help to lend In Roses a degree of character that wasn’t always present in Gem Club’s earlier music.
