The members of the High Strung don't seem content with just being a rock band-- they seem to want to be a legendary rock band. They've made a habit over the years of touring public libraries, and pointedly drove their bus onto the steps of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and left it as though it were an exhibit. It's a novel idea. After all, why work and booze and drug your way into rock history when you can simply drive there?
Get the Guests is the band's third album, their second since co-vocalist Mark Owen left in 2004, and their best to date. The garage rock roughness that characterized their early work as a quartet still pops up here and there, but as a trio they've turned into something different, more of a ragged power pop band than anything. They've chosen to work again with producer Jim Diamond, who's also recorded the White Stripes and the Electric Six, and he keeps the sound raw even as the band honeys up its melodies and writes more nuanced songs. It's a juxtaposition that supplies a lot of the album's tension, but also robs certain moments of the sweetness they might otherwise possess.
Last year, Canadian power pop veterans Sloan discovered with Never Hear the End of It that you can simply jump ship when a song has done what it needs to do, no matter how much time has passed. The result was their best album since the 1990s. The High Strung seem to be in the midst of learning this same lesson-- there are seventeen tracks on this album, most under three minutes. This is a mixed blessing. It ensures a certain amount of variety and forces them to keep most of the songs well within sensible time constraints, but it also makes it harder to get involved with individual songs right away because you're being hit with so much at once. So the tracks that don't end when they need to stand out for the wrong reasons.
Guitarist Josh Malerman has a strange voice-- high and extremely nasal, it's an instrument I can see some people reacting sharply against. But it works on most of these songs. He sounds especially good when he hangs a melody in the middle of his range, as on "There Was No One Before You, There Was No One Before Me", where he's doubled in the mix singing slow phrases over a quick, steady rhythm. He's at his sharpest on perhaps the album's best song, opener "What a Meddler!", which has pretty much everything a great pop song should: a drum part that shifts to reflect the sentiment in the lyrics, a grabbing instrumental hook played on horns, and a great melody that tumbles and bends around well-formed lines like "Gossip for some is a real event/ They strap on and button up their Sunday best."
At their best, these guys make instantly memorable music, such as on "Maybe You're Coming Down With It", which intertwines Chad Stocker's melodic bass line and the verse vocal around a one-note guitar part, or "Childhood", which changes up the band's formula for a ballad with nothing but voice, organ, and acoustic guitar. "I believe in childhood/ I believe it still exists," sings Malerman in a wistful tone that suggests he's maybe not so sure. It almost has the same effect as REM's Automatic for the People ballad "Sweetness Follows" in terms of how it fits on the album.
At their worst, the High Strung try to cram psych-tinged instrumental breaks into songs that don't have room for them. "He's Got No Soul" needs to die after two minutes, but instead goes off on a bland, pounding tangent dominating by an excessive, unshapely guitar solo. These bits crop up on several songs-- a bit of sax chaos here, a bashing bridge there-- but they're never quite enough to sink the whole enterprise.
Get the Guests isn't perfect, but it's enjoyable and at its peaks is flat-out great. The High Strung have their sound, and have their funky little history. At this point, it's mostly a matter of refining, streamlining, and finding a greater degree of consistency.
