For sensitive souls of a certain vintage, Nate Mendel is a hero simply for playing bass on the first two albums by Sunny Day Real Estate, the band that helped elevate emo from mere "emotional hardcore" shorthand to a national security threat. Since 1995, however, Mendel has served as bassist for Foo Fighters, trading underground renown for stadium stardom. But while Mendel has been Dave Grohl’s longest-serving foot soldier, he’s also the most unassuming one—he’s neither as iconic as Pat Smear, as flamboyant as Taylor Hawkins, nor as tattooed as Chris Shiflett. Lieutenant represents his first solo bid, and the new alias feels like a sly nod to his deputy ranking in the Foos' megalithic machine. As the outrageously titled but tastefully executed If I Kill This Thing We’re All Going to Eat for a Week makes clear, Mendel is not the sort of guy to celebrate going solo by screaming "I was always caged and NOW I’M FREEEEEEEEEE!" Humble and soft-spoken to a fault, he often sounds as if he’s meekly tiptoeing around the shadows of his own spotlight.
Though the album boasts a formidable guest list of fellow alt-rock lifers—Modest Mouse drummer Joe Plummer, Page Hamilton of Helmet, Sunny Day’s Jeremy Enigk, and fellow Foo Shiflett—there are no scene-stealing cameos here; everyone involved respectfully adapts to Mendel’s relaxed, low-key wavelength. In sharp contrast to his day job, Lieutenant favors unwaveringly pleasant, gently swaying sing-alongs that would fit comfortably amid the more rustic end of the 21st-century Sub Pop roster, as a buffer between the Shins and the Head and the Heart (whose Josiah Johnson also appears here). But even with the decibel meter dialed down to accommodate his wounded croon, Mendel struggles to assert himself, flattening out the album’s dynamic variation in the process.
The music bounds from breezy, string-sweetened chamber-folk ("Belle Epoque") to Weezer-via-Ocasek power-pop ("Rattled") to brooding power ballads ("Lift the Sheet"), but Mendel maintains a passive, shoulder-shrugging presence through it all, keeping the album’s heart rate steady, obscuring his lyrical intent, and muting its emotional impact. It’s an issue that’s only compounded when the arrangements get busier, like on the shifty, brass-bolstered "Sink Sand", which sounds like a holdover from the Foos’ New Orleans sojourn on Sonic Highways. (By contrast, Mendel’s voice finds its most natural fit on "Some Remove", a pretty '70s soft-rock throwback whose gauzy Rhodes organ fuses perfectly with his wistful sigh.) Given the album’s dream-team assembly of players and broad instrumental palette, Mendel clearly has ambitions to create elaborate songs within intimate spaces. But listening to If I Kill This Thing... feels like staring into a terrarium: It's easy to admire the attention to detail and lovingly crafted quaintness, but hard to get inside.
