Bands the size of football teams aren't made to last. They're hard to organize, hard to pack into the basement at Cake Shop, hard to pay-- usually have a lot of friends and family to draw to shows, though. Indie rock's most widely known symphonic-pop chorale, the Polyphonic Spree, started making their joyful noise eight years and three albums ago now, but those white-robed masses surrounding ex-Tripping Daisy frontman Tim DeLaughter have varied over time. Another venerable mega-group, Danielson Famile, have the advantage of being a Famile (the Famile that plays together, stays together). Broken Social Scene members keep putting out solo albums.
The stark odds against super-sizing your band can make the venture an ideal one if you're the type looking to escape the gray practicalities of adulthood. Community was built into the songs on Swedish pop collective I'm From Barcelona's 2006 full-length debut, Let Me Introduce My Friends; underground hit "We're From Barcelona" and its endearing YouTube clip implied a global village-- or at least a Coca-Cola commercial. Somehow, the 20-plus-member group managed to coordinate their calendars and come to North America for a handful of much-praised U.S. shows. Even if I'm From Barcelona had been a quartet, their songs are designed for many voices.
Their second album, Who Killed Harry Houdini?, asks a question laid out in 2006 biography The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America's First Superhero. The book suggests the master magician and escape artist was poisoned, rather than killed by a ruptured appendix (likely cause: punches to the stomach by a McGill student, trying to test Houdini's vaunted strength). Houdini sounds like an attempt to escape from the predicament of the sophomore album, making more nuanced use of orchestration and sticking with a comfortingly sweet and naïve tone while also expanding its perspective. March-like first single "Paper Planes" has sunny guitars, whistling woodwinds, neighbors' sex, and "The Cosby Show", slyly invoking the way we pass unseen through the lives of strangers; free mp3 giveaway "Music Killed Me" adds a kiddie-psych spaceyness, using the choral vocal to full rhetorical advantage. "Andy" politely invites a guy-- with the same name as one of my local bartenders!-- to join the band. But nothing here has the euphoric simplicity of "We're From Barcelona", or quite the infant-"Calvin & Hobbes" wisdom of "Chicken Pox" and "Treehouse".
If a second album is tough, try a second childhood. Yup, there's a lullaby, the sentimental but meandering "Gunhild"; a banjo and synth twee-pop meditation about floating away between "Headphones"; a catchy minor-key Casper cartoon that develops into a musing on mortality, "Little Ghost"; a light ditty about "Ophelia" driving away in one of her two cars; and "Houdini", a clambering power-popper about magic powers, with an almost-spoken melody that reminds me of Snow Patrol's "How to Be Dead".
The emotional guts of the album, though, are in the upbeat "Mingus", which expresses a fear of growing up that recalls but doesn't rival Ben Folds' "Still Fighting It". The flawed but winsome finale, "Rufus", envisions a giant silver labrador in a wide-open golden valley of crowd-handclapping twee-rock "Bohemian Rhapsody". And in the final line, frontman Emanuel Lundgren-- whose name is similar to Manuel, the "Fawlty Towers" character from whom I'm From Barcelona take their name-- sings, ever so softly: "In my heart, I'm still a kid." As Momus once said of childhood, "It's an invention of adults." The Boy Least Likely To's fantastic 2005 debut album will be a tough act to follow, too-- and they're only a duo.
