It's gotta be hard being a band with a schtick. Well, let me clarify that a bit-- it's easy being a band with an image schtick, like Manowar in their leather underwear and fantasy battle gear, but not to be a band with a musical one: after all, staying within the set parameters of one distinct sound tends to result in artists either making the same album over and over again, or limiting their creativity to the point that the quality of their music suffers.
Morphine had that problem to a degree, but they compensated with little deviations like "In Spite of Me", and ultimately even abandoned their stripped bass/drums/sax approach on their overlooked swansong, The Night. The fact is, Morphine had to change on that last album to avoid becoming totally lost in the cul de sac they found themselves in on their previous release, 1997's Like Swimming. God only knows what they'd sound like today if Mark Sandman was still with us.
Traveling further up the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority's Red Line, we find another Boston-area band discovering that a distinctive sound can quickly become a well-worn rut, and subsequently branching out. Guster originally emerged from Tufts University in Somerville, Massachusetts in the mid-90s with a pair of self-released albums that brought their two-guitars-and-bongos busker act to the studio and earned them a bucketload of worshipful praise from the Boston music press. There was a charming simplicity to their portable music, but-- as my esteemed colleague Mark Richardson once remarked about them on this very site-- when you're doing the stripped-down acoustic thing, every song has to hit hard or your album won't hold up.
Guster actually realized this in time for their third album, 1998's Lost & Gone Forever, an album I still give a spin from time to time. That record could have easily been trounced by Steve Lillywhite's spit-shine production, but the songs were so intricately layered and expertly crafted that I didn't really mind. Still, that album's liner notes crowed about the fact that all the drumming was done sans-sticks, and the band's overall dynamic and intensity hadn't changed at all-- they'd just elevated their craft and got a bigger budget. A whole five years later, the band has given up all pretense of preserving their original setup, purchased a drumkit. generously endowed each of their songs with basslines, and even gone so far as to bring aboard Yo La Tengo producer Roger Moutenot.
The trio certainly has no shortage of catchy melodies on hand here, and they open with a three-song volley that'll stick straight to the roof of your mouth. "Diane" is brisk, polite pop spattered with sparingly applied harmonies, while "Careful" takes that formula and squares it, ratcheting up the harmonies the band does so well and taking the time for details like a brief tempo change and some burbling guitar jangle. But it's "Amsterdam" you'll never get out of your head-- this song is so insidiously catchy it could be the theme to a fucking sitcom. It's not as cloylingly sentimental as, say, The Rembrandts, but it's got the requisite squeaky-clean jangle and buoyant harmonies for any number of Jason Alexander vehicles currently in development.
The highlight award is stolen by "Homecoming King", which gives a nod to the hand percussion they built their name on, but makes full use of a rubberband bassline and some harp-like, almost African guitar parts. What Keep it Together has in highs, though, it also has in ho-hum middles-- indeed, it never approaches the track-to-track mastery that Lost & Gone Forever did, painting the corners with midtempo filler like "Backyard" and "Ramona", which are by no means bad, but won't likely grab you at all, either. The band are naturally right at home with the front porch banjo folk of "Jesus on the Radio", but when they try a detour into stuttering prog-pop on the cheekily titled "Red Oyster Cult" (you forgot the umlaut, guys-- get on the ball!), they wind up wasting some good melodies on a distracting arrangement that thinks it's "Achilles' Last Stand".
The thing that really bothers me the most about this album is how conventional it sounds. Guster are undeniably accomplished tunesmiths, but the quirks that show up here in the form of, say, the background whistling on "Long Way Down" or the strange schoolkid choir and fluffy strings of the hidden track used to be more prominent, and it made them a band you could embrace for their artfulness as much as you could listen to them. There's still plenty of chicken soup for your pop soul here, but this time the broth is from concentrate.
