At fourteen years old, I daydreamt about this sort of thing. I imagined that by the time I hit my late twenties, a wave would have kicked up, of groups made up of people my age, who'd been listening to the same records I had: indie rockers weaned on floofy English moaners like Morrissey and the Psychedelic Furs and the masculine American energy of Dinosaur Jr. or the Pixies; indie rockers who understood both the charm of romantic, British new-wave pop and the rush of American guitar-fetish snap-and-jangle; indie rockers who could crank those things together and run them through a decade's progress into something all fresh and glistening. Maybe even indie rockers who shared bashful soft spots for the Sisters of Mercy and the Ocean Blue. All this, I figured-- this second coming of "college" or "post-modern" rock-- would be My Time. Right?
Yeah, well, I was fourteen: dim as I was naive. The bands have started coming, of course, but the bulk of them are sort of boring and disappointing, no matter how lovable. The best, New York's Interpol-- a band that explains its creative differences by pointing out that the guitar player is a Smiths man, while the bassist prefers the Cure-- are as terrific as they aren't because of their obvious reference points; they succeed by virtue of being just freakishly good on all relevant grounds. It's a stretch to expect another.
More common are bands like Longwave, whose spacier indie purity is usually likeable and occasionally stirring, but never quite eventful enough to muster much enthusiasm. And worse: a lesser scad of proper and inoffensively pleasant Average Guitar Bands. They know their Pixies riffs back to front. They've studied the driving jangle and guitar arpeggios of bands from both sides of the Atlantic. They've picked up some atmospherics from stripey-shirted shoegazers, and maybe they're refreshingly unafraid of new wave's affectations, synthesizers, poses, and dancing. If they're good-looking, they'll get a video on M2 and sell some records. And that's Elefant, almost exactly, and without prejudice.
Elefant are okay, if disappointingly just okay. They feel like a less-British, lighter Interpol (or is that a more-British Longwave?), though their inspirations are probably the most Anglophilic of the bunch: frontman and songwriter Diego Garcia has a strong affection for airy poses and washed-out, synthy flower-pop-- one this record can't hide, no matter how much it attempts to showcase a muscular rhythm section and rein in the keyboards-- and his melodic pronouncements tend to be scripted like David Bowie croons, despite frequent attempts to growl them up a little. If Interpol-- apart from Carlos-- are too rock-boy to have ever really loved a Pet Shop Boys record, well, I'll bet Diego did. "Suburbia", at least.
But that's all subtext: for the bulk of Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid's ten songs, the focus is pretty squarely on the band as a tight-wound, big-room pop/rock troupe. Their potential is audible in the first track, "Make Up", which kicks in with a wide-open drive from the band's beefily precise rhythm section, drums rolling and ticking in a tense push underneath an arrow-straight bass groove; Garcia wanders in casually, tossing off his lines all suave before eventually rolling, repeating, and chewing up the phrase "tastes like candy" in a way that becomes a signature here. When the guitar breaks through, it's for a wave of superfast arpeggios, and a moment later, it's back to atmospheric plucks; guitar-handler Mod's remarkable ability to charge and retreat tastefully is one of the band's biggest strengths.
"Bokkie" starts with a boxing-bass strut that's more Interpol than Interpol; its chorus hits an album highlight by throwing some uber-new-wave ba-ba-bas between Garcia's lines. These guys have been looking too long at their pictures of The Cure-- check the synths on "Tonight Let's Dance", or the opening of "Annie"-- and it's not the kill-me kill-me kill-me sinkholes they've picked out of it: it's the rhythm-led pop of "Just Like Heaven", stripped down to an American naturalism.
The problem is that Garcia isn't about to write any songs that good-- nor, sadly, any songs as good as most of Interpol's, nor any songs as good as those of New York moody-Brit recreationists My Favorite (note to Diego: ask them if you can cover "The Black Cassette"). If Sunlight Makes Me Paranoid has that lovable ten-solid-songs consistency, it's less a matter of lacking filler and more a matter of writing a lot of inoffensive but uninspiring tracks that all wander down the same avenues. Most of them have a hook somewhere you'll shrug and admit is decent, but the highlights can be far between, and even those feel more like good craftsmanship than revelations. At worst, the album can be a bit like looking over a tax return: everything's printed neatly in place, and it all adds up, but there's nothing to get excited over.
Which is one of a few problems I should have noticed in my fourteen-year-old daydream. It's the problem with a lot of bands like this, these shiny American indie bands with their unforced and totally-natural nods toward their college-rock records: even when they feel good, sound good-- and look good-- it's not entirely likely to be going anywhere. A lot has happened since the turn of the 90s, and hardly anyone is going to be able to grab that ring as Interpol have. Tolerable, and occasionally enjoyable as Elefant may be, their trip through the looking glass is hardly magical.
