Degeneration Street, the fifth album by Montreal's the Dears, should, in theory, sound like sweet redemption. Following the release of and tours behind 2006's Gang of Losers, the Dears founder Murray A. Lightburn lost most of his long-time band to attrition. That album had been the most successful for the Dears, though, with support from the label Arts & Crafts and respectable chart positions in Britain and Canada. The Dears-- dubbed "probably the best new band in the world" just years before by NME-- seemed to be falling. While the split almost ended the Dears, Lightburn and keyboardist Natalia Yanchak persevered, recruiting friends and former collaborators to piece together 2008's Missiles. The change felt welcome, too, as Missiles was a textured, pensive album, tempering some of the Dears' bombast with well-considered arrangements. Lightburn soon got his band back, reassembling the six-piece version of the Dears for months of intense writing, rehearsing, and recording. That convocation, however, is about as happy as this story gets: Overwrought, overemphatic, and overly suggestive of a band that's using its second chance to go for the big time, Degeneration Street is a miserable album.
Everything Degeneration Street attempts feels a bit too emphatic. When it rocks, it heads for the arenas; when it slinks, it seeks the cover of low, gray clouds. That problem has two-fold consequences. First, it makes many the songs maudlin and melodramatic, occasionally unbearable. What's more, it makes each Dears approach-- heavy rock insurgencies, sweeping synthesizer ambles, big breezy janglers-- seem that much more polar. The album feels scattered and uneven, like a band without direction or restraint.
The individual looks aren't so appealing, either: During "Blood" and "Stick w/ Me Kid", the Dears race through would-be alternative rock anthems-- and here, alternative rock is meant to suggest sterilized Smashing Pumpkins, or something like Collective Soul-- with stock rock guitars and vocal effects as dated as ClipArt. "Galactic Tides" and the closing title track suggest the limpid, clammy post-Britpop echoes of Starsailor and Elbow, with studio tricks and ornate instrumental flourishes doing their best to mask songs that don't say too much. The chiming guitars and skittering drums of "Unsung" are facsimiles of Radiohead after 2003, but the song's big, dumb chorus-- "We're too/ We're too young," shouted for triumph-- conjures Coldplay in the worst way. There's a little bit of Arcade Fire, some Neil Diamond, maybe a little bit of TV on the Radio: From end to end, it feels as though the Dears are strewing sounds about the studio, making a last-ditch effort to make anything stick.
On "Thrones", Lightburn lets loose with one of Degeneration Street's dozen or so lyrical clichés. "We can't go through this again," he howls over swiveling guitars and smothering keyboard textures. "Plucking your eyes out/ turn into stone." In the final verse, the band fades into phosphorescence while he continues his tale of forging forward, summoning Springsteen: "Saw it disappear into the dark/ All the hope we put together falls apart/ In a millisecond point zero one." It's hard to hear those lines and not consider that Degeneration Street is a reunion album of sorts, at least for the six people that comprise the Dears here. Emotion, especially the feeling that you've got another unexpected shot, doesn't always pair so well with reason. With inchoate, banal lyrics and blustering tunes that go for it all, all the time, Degeneration Street sounds like the product of too much euphoria. Definitely catch the Dears on the comedown, if at all.
