There was a time-- they call it "the 1960s," I'm told-- when it was common in certain circles to propose love as a solution to all of the world's problems. This is temptingly elegant. Just love each other, man. Boom! No more problems. Well, this is not the 60s. This is the 00s, or the naughts, or the oughts, or...we still haven't figured out what to call this decade, but it's much later, at any rate. We have seen that love will not solve the world's problems, and we are cynical. There is terror out there somewhere, we're told, and it is coming to get us.
I sense that dancing away this terror will be about as effective as loving away war, but I like the idea of trying. I doubt that the members of the Capitol Years seriously intend the title of their third album (second as a full band) as true post-hippie sentiment-- more than likely, it's another in a long line of vaguely sarcastic references to orange alert level fatigue. If nothing else, the Capitol Years have spent the last few years getting progressively more danceworthy, rocking things up a bit and getting loose.
Dance Away the Terror takes that well-earned looseness and turns the harmony hose on it, bringing the rawk of the Capitol Years' previous album Let Them Drink and the Jewelry Store EP into the candy shop of pop. Leader Shai Halperin has kept the punch in the band's arrangements while softening his vocal melodies-- in scope, this is closest to his first album, when he alone was the Capitol Years, but it's much more memorable than that record. For instance, when Dance Away dips closest to the insular folk he was trafficking in back then, on "Seven Songs", the directness of the melody and the sharpness of the three-part harmony send it right home as ambient flurries of electric piano fall around it.
"Revolutions" has a floating feel provided by a jaunty rhythm and pentatonic bass line, and the vocals fall in so naturally it feels like they were dropped there. The smoothness of the verses is offset by descending guitar runs and a series of double-stop interludes where the band piles on the spacey guitar and chiming keys. "You Can Stay There" is drenched in velvety vocal interplay, and the album closes with a solid one-two power pop punch. "Oh Lord" features Halperin's most impassioned lead vocal, paired with a catchy melody, while "It's Not Okay" teases after the opening verse with a chasmic pause, before redoubling and heading off for a huge chorus that takes hippie sentiment head-on with the line "It's not okay to believe in love."
The album isn't perfect-- the title track and its companion "As the Terror Dances Your Way" don't do much other than provide a point of reprise-- but it's the band's best full-length yet, and shows their approach maturing and becoming more nuanced. For a rock album, it actually has a rather calming effect, and it certainly wouldn't make much of a soundtrack for the forget-the-world celebration of its title, but it stays with you either way as a satisfying album.
