New York-based indie-poppers Clare and the Reasons seem willing to turn an appreciation of John, Paul, George, and Ringo into a guiding artistic principle. Now, I'm certain nominal frontwoman Clare Manchon, her husband and prime collaborator Olivier, and the rest of the band's contributors would claim a wealth of other influences, particularly classic makers of cosmopolitan pop standards and cool orchestral platters, who've lent the group's sophomore album, Arrow, its air of sophisticated frothiness. Yet it doesn't change the fact that overt Beatles simulacrums are all over this record, to the point where it begins to pull your attention away from any recognition of Clare and the Reasons' charms-- though perhaps those charms aren't quite pronounced enough in the first place to convincingly outweigh games of spot-that-soundalike.
The Manchons learned melody well at the feet of Lennon-McCartney and the couple's other masters, as Arrow comes equipped with an estimable measure of charming refrains that linger with you long after the album, particularly the delicately wounded "Ooh You Hurt Me So", the buoyant "You Getting Me", and the swooningly swinging "This Is the Story". Unfortunately, these lightly agreeable tunes are ornamented by music that's even more unobtrusive. St. Vincent has lately demonstrated that you can construct a compelling aesthetic by juxtaposing highly mannered vocalisms with arty, unpredictable sonic fare, but Clare and the Reasons refuse to stretch beyond polite listenability in any arena. It's hard to encounter these songs and not daydream about how a little dissonance and unpredictability could add a wealth of tension and gratification to the proceedings. Instead, we get modestly friendly string-and-horn arrangements, and, if the band's feeling especially frisky, perhaps a bit of mildly burbling synth ("You Got Time", "Perdue a Paris").
And we get lots and lots of stuff that sounds like the Beatles-- the solitary pealing guitar blurts of "Ooh You Hurt Me So", "This Is the Story", and "Kyoto Nights", the "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" bass of "Murder, They Want Murder"-- even the horns on the band's superfluous cover of Genesis' "That's All" hearken back to Revolver and *Sgt. Pepper'*s far more than anything from the Phil Collins playbook. The moptop mimesis reaches its boiling point on "Photograph", which manages in its two and a half minutes to evoke "She's Leaving Home", "Eleanor Rigby", and side two of Abbey Road (it also conjures up "Paint It, Black", so perhaps we should be on the lookout for Stones hagiography next time around). When the Beatles first made these sounds the effect was revolutionary-- reproducing them 40 years after the fact is, at best, a charming dead end.
