In its best moments, The Book of Bad Breaks-- Thee More Shallows' third album-- is outstanding. The meat of the album is generally good, with strong vocals and decent songs, but there's enough gristle on this record that it ultimately obscures some of the pleasures of listening to it. On their previous (and best) album, 2005's More Deep Cuts, Thee More Shallows seemed headed toward a sort of Flaming Lips-inspired audio playground; they're still messing with sound, but this time the experimentation is more noise-oriented, and that unfortunately means some tracks are slathered with messy, unflattering sounds and distortion.
The best songs harness the noisiness and transcend it, while others are simply hobbled by it. "Oh Yes, Another Mother" falls into the former camp, whipping along on a killer drum beat that boils to a frenzy as the song reaches its peak. The song is led off by a separately sequenced intro track consisting of a small string arrangement and some hints of percussion. Dee Kesler's high yet full vocals are underpinned by an ever-growing drone that threatens to overtake it after the second verse, but recedes for the quiet coda.
The noise is likewise sculpted and tightly controlled on "Night at the Knight School", which gets beyond its somewhat gimmicky title with lyrics that could apply to just about anyone in college-- the song's character is focusing on the pain of a toothache to stay awake and finish his work amidst a host of distractions. Buzzing guitars and keyboards are manhandled into melodic shapes to create secondary hooks. The song that follows, "Proud Turkeys", is perhaps the most confounding thing on the record. Brief strings are swallowed by a flat-out ugly guitar part and thrashing drums, and the first stab at a verse is a disorganized, tentative build-up to the non-sequitur line "proud turkeys with the gift of flight." It recovers from the sloppiness as it goes on but never really becomes much of a song, instead settling for an atmospheric violin coda.
Listening to the record as a whole is a strangely dividing experience-- on the one hand, it's impressive that so many of the songs are strong enough to overcome the over-saturation in the production. But on the other, it's a shame they couldn't just let these songs simply flower on their own without a big fuzzy weight tied to them. Because of the way it's recorded, The Book of Bad Breaks is a record that takes a bit of time to work your way into, but some of what sounds merely noisy on an early listen reveals itself as more detailed and nuanced once you get to know it.
