One of my favorite singles last year was Fred Falke's remix of the Whitest Boy Alive's "Golden Cage", a glossy, euphoric piece of electro-pop that mutated a gentle, unassuming disco comedown into a late-decade bookend to Daft Punk's "Digital Love". Yet despite the way Falke's remix brought out the best qualities of his syrupy, lonesome voice, Whitest Boy (and Kings of Convenience) head Erlend Øye is most comfortable when he's a bit subdued and quiet. And as much as massive house beats complement his vocals, he seems most at home when his musical surroundings undergo the same state of half-withdrawn restraint that he's in. Even in shifting from Kings of Convenience's acoustic pastoralism to the plugged-in, dance-friendly pop of the Whitest Boy Alive, Øye seemed like he was aiming not for bars or nightclubs, but the headphones of people walking down empty streets.
The abandoned-dancefloor atmosphere of 2006's Dreams made TWBA a surprising side-project debut, but sophomore album Rules expands the mood just a little-- and, in the process, the sound gets a little more crowded. Where its predecessor let the rhythm breathe and gave most of the attention to Øye's sleepy murmur and his loudly echoing, desolate-sounding guitar, Rules pushes the beats just a bit more forward and has Øye's riffs sharing a tighter space with Daniel Nentwig's expanded, more prominent palette of synths and keyboards. It doesn't improve things any: With that much more emphasis placed on the backbeat and away from that bell-like guitar sound that made the original "Golden Cage" (or "Figures" or "Borders" from the debut) so haunting, the relatively upbeat moments sound a bit more like the brusque, arch Krautfunk of recent Fujiya & Miyagi. And while it seems like it'd be a good trade-off to have a version of Lightbulbs with a warmer-sounding vocalist and some actual human emotion, emphasizing the groove only reveals that bassist Marcin Oz and drummer Sebastian Maschat seem strangely hesitant about going full disco.
As catchy as much of Rules is, that hesitancy brings about an imbalance of mood; tracks like "Keep a Secret", "Courage", and "1517" (the latter of which sounds oddly like a cocktail-funk tweak of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger") ride on grooves that feel like they should be livelier than the subtly muffled bass and drumbeats that propel them, leaving the guitar to pick up the rhythmic slack. The songs frequently fall into an odd, twitchy no-man's land between unhurried minimalism and actual funk that the previous album was too relaxed to stumble into, though TWBA do pull themselves together enough for the more motorik "Dead End" and the slow-build faux-house crescendo of "Island" to step lively for real. It's more of a problem if you're expecting a straight-up dance album than an unassuming indie pop album, and if all you need's a warm pulse and a taut rhythm section-- and that chiming guitar, which still rings out often enough-- those moments are more than adequate. The points where Rules gets a little too mellow are where it goes from the vaguely compelling to the preciously cloying, i.e., the tropical torpor of "Intentions" and the Ambien-fueled headswim of "Rollercoaster Ride", which does less to evoke its lyrical conceit than it does a leisurely paddle-boat excursion.
At least Øye still plays to his strengths. To be honest, a more vigorous backbeat might undermine much of the sentiment in Rules with his plaintive presence still running things, especially since whatever loneliness that was lost with the busier production has been compensated for lyrically. Sure, the subject matter's familiar-- infidelity between friends in "Gravity", the feeling of uncommunicative isolation in "Island", the difficulty of committing ("Courage") and of ending that commitment ("Dead End"), but Øye sings them with a distinctly sugary melancholy that can't be mistaken for anyone else's voice. All that worn-down, flagging energy behind it is something that can at least be endured-- though at least the potential remixes could be interesting.
