An action figure is usually jointed, thus capable of various dynamic poses. A figurine, meanwhile, is typically frozen into a single pose. It might enjoy an exquisite level of detail, might be nice to look at for awhile. But in the end, it isn't meant to be engaged with-- it sits idly on the mantle, gathering dust, its inflexibility limiting its imaginative potential.
So it goes with the Danish indie band Figurines' third effort. For an album that ostensibly covers so many styles-- from garage psychedelia to pastoral pop to blues-rock-- it's remarkably static. Tempos and structures change, but the mood-- like a bright but overcast day, hard and flat-- is so unremitting as to render these various styles homogeneous. Christian Hjelm's reedy vocals don't spice things up; while winning in spurts, they sag over the course of the album. And its pillaging of influences, most egregiously Brian Wilson and the Zombies, makes it even harder to find anything that feels fresh amid the nostalgia.
Figurines still falls somewhere between Built to Spill's indie/classic rock and Modest Mouse's glassy sheen (or maybe Rogue Wave doing garage rock instead of soft rock), but the smoothing process that unfolded over the first two is still in progress. While it still contains its share of the angles and edges on which the band made their name, a lot of the twangs and yelps are spitted down like errant hairs, making for a largely frictionless glide. The album's ceramic frangibility is sometimes lovely, especially on more retiring songs like "Good Old Friends", but doesn't invite excessive handling.
These criticisms are tempered by the album's handful of captivating moments and overall pleasantness: Nothing about it inspires hostility, only boredom. A few bits stand up next to most anything from Skeleton, Figurines' widely praised sophomore album. "Let's Head Out", wreathed in a fog of spectral harmonies, manages to float and swing simultaneously (the swing is especially important for breaking up the album's overarching stride). Hjelm tends to move between his natural singing voice and falsetto in broad arcs, which doesn't help to make the music dynamic, but here he nimbly condenses the distance between the two, making it more engaging and less belabored.
The haunting "Good Old Friends" rides minimal percussion and humming synths toward a terse shimmy, flecked with piano and guitar. It's quiet and distinctive, decked out with some neat lyrics ("It arrived when the deer wore blue," sings Hjelm, presumably concocting a striking ESL metaphor for nighttime). And "Drunkard's Dream", while perhaps overly long at seven and a half minutes, is a tangle of tight, whizzing blues-rock licks that sound inspired, vocals climbing them like a ladder.
But elsewhere, When the Deer Wore Blue suffers from a case of the doldrums. "Childhood Verse" keeps interrupting its rolling harmonies and twinkling breaks with crunchy garage bits that are unpleasantly antic. "The Air We Breathe" is an loving paean to Brian Wilson, replete with bang-on wafting harmonies and falsetto lead vocals-- it improves when Hjelm abandons this deeply derivative sound and sings naturalistically over dreamy piano. The twinkling rock creeper "Drove You Miles" is inoffensive but profoundly whatevs. So is "Half Awake, Half Aware", which lacks a remotely memorable melody-- and memorable melody is where this band lives or dies. A meandering vocal line fails to make much of the garage psych licks of "Angels of the Bayou", and another whizzy blues-rocker, "Bee Dee", is too manic to engage with the raucous precision of "Drunkard's Dream".
Pitchfork's review of Skeleton went out of its way to make something special of its hooks, which were in fact its best quality. This is a tough sell, though, because every pop song has hooks, and the difference between a good hook and a bad one is tough to pin down. It seems to have more to do with the hook's context than its actual content-- how it explodes from, settles into, or otherwise complicates the arrangement-- that makes it burn into our memories. Hookiness is still Figurines' defining quality, and there are some good ones here, but in couched in music that doesn't stray outside of the borders of its influences, it's a case of diminishing returns. Unless you're a diehard retro-rock fan, you might want to leave this figurine in its natural environment: on the shelf.
