Familiarity can be a crutch, or a comfort; in the case of Ames, Iowa's Poison Control Center, it's very much the latter. Something about Sad Sour Future, their slack-but-sturdy double LP, is bound to set off a lightbulb or two in the head of anybody who's ever made it through a few Superchunk records. Their rangy, restless guitar tangles harken back to the brainy, punchy work of the Chunk, Archers of Loaf, Pavement and the like. Primary singer Patrick Fleming's got one of those classic indie dude voices, insistent and a little pinched, and the other guys fall in nicely. (Devin Frank does a mean David Berman.) Even Sad Sour Future's analog production lends the proceedings a loose-fitting, era-appropriate warmth. But whereas most throwback acts are content to take a loan out on every last thing, personality included, Poison Control Center are far too sharp and self-assured to need a lender on anything that vital; lax and charming, these tunes feel fresh even when the music veers a tad out of time.
PCC are dabblers; their past work ran a weirdly effective gamut from Les Savy spaz to the more ornate Elephant 6 stuff, and while they're certainly pounding the Pavement a lot harder on Sad Sour Future, touches of Beulah-style horn flare ups and Tullycraft twee run ideal interference on all the goldbricking. Songs circle back on themselves, winding melodies into countermelodies into even more melodies; what seems at first limber and casual reveals itself as carefully considered and pretty crafty, with hooks duking it out among the myriad guitar interjections. The hour-and-change runtime means nobody's checking their watch, and these songs feel wonderfully unhurried-- guitar solos seem to bleed out of the tracks, horns tumble into the frame, tempos stroll, and Fleming occasionally lets his singing fall just behind the beat, all to fine effect. Theirs is an agile sound, neither overeager or overblown, and even when things get to feeling a little familiar, the knotty melodies and judicious instrumental touches carry the songs over.
Lyrically, PCC opt for sweet slices of life occasionally cut through with a little abstraction; their tales of hanging out downtown with elegant gals and riding golf carts around their grandfathers' farm are richly detailed, chatty, and full of left turns. Their verses saunter, but their choruses soar, and you don't walk away from these tunes wondering what's meant by them. I wouldn't consider Poison Control Center a to-the-point kind of band-- at 71 minutes, Sad Sour Future certainly wanders-- but these tunes know precisely when to throw a hook in your path; you could, for example, slice "Calling Card" into maybe three parts and have three perfectly good choruses to build a tune around. You might say that's overgenerous; you could say the same about Sad Sour Future as a whole. But if a not-unhealthy respect for its elders and maybe one too many catchy numbers all in a row are the worst things one can level at Poison Control Center, clearly this is a band worth getting familiar with.
