Aside from an occasional one-off live set, Eddy Current Suppression Ring have been gone for eight years—a veritable lifetime in garage rock. That’s nine albums from Thee Oh Sees, a dozen by Ty Segall, and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s entire 15-album discography. Before they walked away for nearly a decade, the Australian quintet built a reputation with three albums and a pile of singles that balanced regimented order with rock’n’roll disarray. Their often-motorik rhythm section offered a foundation for Mikey Young’s guitar fuzz and frontman Brendan Huntley’s slovenly speak-sung lyrics. At their best, they were wild and untenable, offering up the screaming tension of “Anxiety” and the fast-paced churn of “You Let Me Be Honest With You.” They had songs impressive enough to get placed in AT&T commercials and Spoon sets. When they went away, Young kept carrying the torch, crafting some of the decade’s best post-punk with Total Control while working feverishly as a prolific studio engineer.
All in Good Time is an apt title for ECSR’s unceremonious return—an acknowledgment of both their long hiatus and the patience required to appreciate this album for what it is. This is not the ECSR whose explosive guitar work defined their best album, 2008’s Primary Colours. They’re back with the same formula and aesthetic as their earlier work, but they don’t sound nearly as invigorated or inspired.
The song that announced the new album, “Our Quiet Whisper,” finds the quartet in a more reflective zone. Huntley—who performs under the name Brendan Suppression—sounds disenchanted and sensitive as he sings about an inconvenient political climate where “actions speak louder than words.” The band’s overall actions, meanwhile, are unhurried. The song adopts a gradual pace, and when a guitar solo does happen, it’s low-key. That’s the overall tone of All in Good Time: staid, steady, humming along.
Where they found prior success by striking the balance between organization and wildness, All in Good Time could stand to be a lot more combustible. Huntley, whose voice is historically among the band’s wildest and most energizing forces, sounds pensive on several songs. There are attempts at ratcheting up the energy, but while Huntley shouts and Young leans into distorted power chords on “Vicariously Living,” the band’s overall mid-tempo approach keeps the pace sluggish. Young’s guitar often adds weight and volume to the album, but on “Medieval Wall,” his chutzpah only reinforces the same lackluster hook instead of diversifying their approach.
ECSR were always a band who excelled at building anticipation; “I Admit My Faults” was a master class in distributing Huntley’s shouts and Young’s shredding in the perfect spots here and there while otherwise letting the groove take its time. All in Good Time’s best songs are longform expressions of that same restraint. “Voices” builds quietly from silence, and as Young’s guitar varies up enough to move the song in new directions, it’s the perfect backdrop for Huntley’s nonchalant observations about writer’s block and nagging doubts. He sounds tortured when he’s asking for some quiet—the perfect sentiment on a song where Young’s well-placed licks repeatedly interrupt the album’s best groove. “Shoulders,” meanwhile, is all simmer and no boil, and as a result, it just spins in place. No riveting individual performance from any of the band’s members dives in to rescue a tepid melody that repeats again and again.
When the energy and momentum drag, it’s Huntley’s reflective and empathetic lyrics that stand as the album’s greatest strength. There’s a song where he encounters Brendan Suppression from the future; he’s not offered a grim warning, but encouraged to take better care of himself. Huntley extends that care outward as well, singing on “Like a Comet” about how someone came into his life and reshaped him completely. So much of the time, Huntley’s observations are insular, which colors the album’s overall tone. But as Danny Young’s drums rev up and Huntley sings about the tremors running through him, the music becomes celebratory, and the album suddenly feels light, like it’s inches above the ground.
That lightness sticks around but curdles slightly on the closing track “Modern Man.” Huntley sings about making a wish on a dandelion, and then he talks about how you shouldn’t trust your neighbor and should maybe padlock your garden hose. The band breathes life into a gradual jam by carefully picking the right spots for synthesizer stabs and guitar licks. The key to Eddy Current Suppression Ring’s most successful music is balance, and while the band struggles to recapture some of their old magic, Huntley finds that same sweet spot in his lovingly unromantic storytelling.
Buy: Rough Trade
