Last August, while kids with cars sped past my claustrophobic apartment blasting a bass-heavy "Hot in Herre", I was zoned on caffeine and couldn't stop listening to Darklands. Somehow, during an otherwise cheerful humidity, the Jesus & Mary Chain's rain-soaked, starry nightshade emerged as my summer jam; its timeless songwriting, vintage atmospherics, anthropomorphic feedback, and shut-eye-dreamy pace melded ten echoing heartbreakers into an endlessly churning blue-black backdrop easing the transition into Fall. A year later, embodying the Jesus & Mary Chain's offhanded, emotionally resonant cool, are the four women in Detroit's Slumber Party, whose latest album opts to strum within a swirl of paper lamps, coffee-breath yawns, and the slip-and-slide chill of 1 a.m. dew on bare feet.
3's ten tracks come and go like blurred horizon lines. When they hit their stride, endings blend into beginnings like frost-bitten hands imperceptibly retreat into wool sweaters and each chord burrows the listener further into the orange-drenched sock-hop of an otherwise forgotten backyard party as scored with smashed fireflies by Galaxie 500, rollicking Mazzy Star, or a young Velvet Underground, sans Warhol's smarmy machinations. (Though the band did manage to get heavily German Romantic liner notes written by Cary Loren of the decadently fatalistic 70s anti-rock band Destroy All Monsters, who created droning film-noir psychedelia hacked apart and reanimated by Nico and The Silver Apples. If that doesn't offer at least a tab of credibility...) Elaborately 60s downtown without the retro posturing, the Slumber Party wrap authentic know-how around simple human longings.
The inner sleeve depicts the smiling band with cocked pistols aimed at a giant black heart, but otherwise the smiles are pretty rare. Not as mopey as icy Codeine and avoiding the pained, hyper-aesthete wallow of Red House Painters, a triumphantly defiant track like "Your Friends" pairs simple guitar parts and a syrupy vocal line to create a gauzy improvisation using "Here Comes the Sun" as a launching point and Opal's dark magic as a landing pad.
The album's opener, "Electric Boots", is similarly soporific, but with quicker drumming-- like Mo Tucker breaking out a primitive "And Then He Kissed Me"-- and a noodly guitar picking and sliding like damp leaves falling from an October elm. Here the vocals are insulated with reverb, doused with enough distance to become another instrument breathing without a specific verbal meaning. When they're audible, the lyrics are an overheard conversation: "To see you treat her so kind, it should turn my eyesight blind."
True to its title, "Air" flies the vocals higher, introducing more feedback than elsewhere, and allowing the band's multi-part harmonizing to rest upon slide guitar, beautiful lens-flair reverberations, Shaggs stutter-stop harmonizing, and ever-precipitate drum parts. "Why?" spins itself around piano, uncurling pedal steel, pulsating background analog distortion, and what sounds like a distant violin held in check by a removal of all high-end; as the song progresses, the violin speaks up, the vocals drift to the distance, and the lap steel twists against sighed piano notes like northern lights in Kendra Smith's dusted constellations.
A few slip-ups crack the spell. "New Trouble" falls apart when it goes for slinky instead of soporific, turning into a busy, chirping spy theme unhinged through extended distortion breaks, a telephone ringer, and a ha-ha band discussion. "Drunk" has too-upfront percussion and thin vocals reminiscent of a weaker Damon & Naomi track. And then there's "Black Hearted Rode", which plods along for four uninspired minutes with anomalous harmonica exclamation points and a tepid vocal line; fortunately, with nary a minute remaining, it shakes off the mid-afternoon ho-hum and resurfaces with jingle bells, Pet Sounds-esque instrumental sighing, gentle percussion, and a wash of pink and gray AM-radio reverb-- it's quite the dramatic save.
Though Slumber Party could branch out into any number of livelier directions, for the most they wisely keep to the hazy nocturnal vibe. 3 isn't as powerful or tightly conceived as Darklands, but it does offer quite a few hazy gems. And sometimes, as is the case here, imperfection is quite enough-- the constant threat of an unwanted sunrise or a noisy misstep adding to the important beauty temporary shadows cast upon the prosaic parts of your day.
