All I hear is Chris Appelgren's voice. It sticks out like a bare ass in the window of a passing school bus. While the band plays squeaky-clean garage rock, Appelgren hops and skips through the melody, arbitrarily shrieking one note and dragging another behind him like a rag doll. His voice doesn't even sound integrated in the mix: it comes through so loud and clear, and so much more histrionic than the rest of the band, that you can picture him alone in an isolation booth, planning out how he'll maul each lyric.
Appelgren has plenty of tricks up his sleeve and a firm hold on his technique. He's talked about using his voice as an instrument, which seems to mean that he wants to wheeze out as many sounds as possible: sneers, yelps, shrieks, moans, and drawn-out, pitch-bent tones of pure whining noise. Dig the full-bore slide into meaningless lines like, "Sunned things speak to me/ To the effect of free."
But the casual listener won't judge Appelgren on what he can do so much as how it all sounds, and in the studio, his voice veers towards needy, overwrought, and a little immature. At his day job, Appelgren is a sophisticated businessman who runs the Lookout! Records label; but on "Breakfast," when he sings, "Fix me breakfast," he sounds like your visiting nephew waking you up and demanding food. The wailing on "C'mon" places him at five years old, maybe six. At other times he sounds like a teenager, and although rock caters to needy teens, how often do you actually want to listen to one? No, Appelgren, you can't borrow the damn car tonight. I don't care if Sally's easy. And that's no way to talk about a girl.
Meanwhile, the band chugs along somewhat anonymously. The Pattern's crack indie veterans include Jason Rosenberg of Saint James Infirmary and Andy Asp of Nuisance on guitars, bassist Carson Bell of The Cutz, and drummer Scott Batiste from Heart of Snow. They rock hard, but they don't have much personality together-- and it doesn't help to play straight-out garage-rock at a time when such records are pure commodities.
Even with only six songs on the disc, nothing they wrote stands out: they don't have any new hooks or riffs, the pace is rigid, and there's nothing you'll be humming on your way to work tomorrow morning. The material puts this album damn near the platonic ideal of the Pitchfork 5.0: not awful, but not great. It only eeks above that because, whether or not you like Appelgren, there's never a dull moment when he's around.
Word on the street is that these guys give good gig, which landed them on tour this spring with the Mooney Suzuki and The Hives. (Which is why they're getting notice now, and why we're reviewing this a year after it came out... we're whores to fashion, but at least we're honest.) A lot of bands can't capture on record what they do to a crowd: they rock you all night but send you home with a disc you never end up playing. But if you dug their tour, or you can't get enough of that wholesome, "Hey Jimmy, let's start a garage band!" sound, they have a newer single, "Fragile Awareness," on their website. On that MP3, Appelgren's voice is better integrated and the band sounds for-real frenzied. Save your money for their next album.
