“Hollow Visions.” “Yellow Eyes.” “Tough Luck.” The song titles on Eagulls’ 2014 self-titled practically form a Friday Night Lights locker-room mantra for the sort of outcasts who spent their high-school years getting stuffed into lockers. And yet their hard-charging goth-punk anthems channeled disillusionment into a full-contact sport, with vocalist George Mitchell screaming himself hoarse as if leading a team downfield to annihilate an opponent. Now, after tearing up the turf on their debut, the Leeds band spend their second album trying to build mountains.
As its anagrammed title suggests, on Ullages, everything has been rearranged, but nothing has changed. The band’s marauding gusto and shoegaze overdrive has been replaced by patient builds, soft-focus interstitials and a dream-pop shimmer. (It’s an evolution highly reminiscent of another band of Brits who traded in goth gloom for Big Rock ambition—The Horrors.) But despite the dramatic scenery change, Mitchell remains committed to ripping out his heart and giving us a close-up of the bruises. The crystalline sound simply allows for an unobstructed view of his anguish and anxiety.
It also lets Mitchell get as close to embodying Robert Smith as you possibly can without the jet-black palm-tree hairdo and badly applied lipstick. With the throat-shredding barks of old tempered into a yelp, Mitchell wields more control over his voice. Slow-dissolve anthems like “Euphoria” and “Velvet” feel like the biggest breakthroughs here—their stewing sense of despair doesn’t so much erupt as gradually bubble over, as Mitchell invests their verses with the gravitas of choruses through each increasingly impassioned pass. Ullages also betrays Mitchell’s gift for painting his greyscale world with colorful details and knowing, self-deprecating humor: on the sashaying “Psalms,” an inquiry to a palm reader opens with the comically dreary line, “Is our future grey as the slabs on our drives?” And when he sings, “When all the fruits from all my labor plummets over me” on the Bunnymen-esque “Lemontrees,” you realize he’s only writing about this tropical citrus source because it yields the heaviest foodstuff to drop on his head.
But with its predecessor’s white-knuckled intensity in much more limited supply here, Ullages can sag under the weight of its misery, and struggle to rise above pure Cure karaoke. It doesn’t help that mid-tempo churns like the soggy-ember torch song “My Life In Rewind” and the “Fascination Street”-grooved “Skipping” respectively use cassette-replay and broken-record metaphors to comment on the often cruel cycle of life, while coming off like repetitive slogs themselves. And the sense of inertia is compounded by an album-closing pair of ballads—“Aisles” and “White Lie Lullabies”—that follow the same route from quietude to climax, both gradually obliterating Mitchell’s presence in a cathedral-toppling avalanche of noise. Eagulls’ debut made its catharsis feel communal—a shout-along salvo like “Possessed” was effectively a group exorcism performed in a sweaty, overcrowded basement punk dive. Ullages opens up a greater sense of space for Eagulls to soar, but can feel more distant and isolating as a result.
