Throughout most of its lifespan, Dischord Records has trafficked almost exclusively in big, bruising, anthemic post-punk. Many of its best artists (Fugazi, Nation of Ulysses, Circus Lupus) approached transcendent outrage in oblique and radically different ways, but they all sounded larger than the sum of their parts. In the past few years, bands such as Q and Not U and Black Eyes drank deep from a more tourettically rhythmic form of rage, but it's been rage just the same. D.C. punk bands, however, rarely last for more than an album or two, and both of those bands have already broken up; the only surviving band from Dischord's mid-90s peak is Lungfish. In recent years, the label has gone small, releasing a string of records that look inward as much as outward, like the two prettily hushed albums by Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina's Evens. And now they've got Antelope, a trio who's muted restraint often prevents them from writing songs that even resonate as songs, let alone anthems; draw from that whatever conclusions you like about the state of American post-punk.
Reflector is Antelope's first full-length, if you can call a 10-song, 25-minute CD a full-length. It might be the cleanest-sounding record that Dischord has ever released-- or at least since that last Fidelity Jones album. Everything is restrained and minimal: the flinty and trebley guitar lines, the clearly enunciated vocals, the tick-tock pulse-drums. Sometimes, that cold sparseness serves the band well, as on the opening title track, which marries a glimmering motorik bassline to a gorgeously longing vocal from former Vertebrate Bee Elvy. Other times, it results in annoying messes like the obnoxiously monotonous "Contraction", which manages to be harsh and choppy without building up the slightest hint of catharsis and which seems way longer than its two-and-a-half minutes.
Eventually, a pattern emerges. The band splits its vocal duties between two poles, with Elvy's melodious coo sharing space with the violent adenoidal honks of fellow former Vertebrate Mike Andre and former El Guapo and Supersystem member Justin Moyer. (Andre and Moyer's vocals sound so alike that this review originally credited all of them to Moyer.) When Elvy sings lead, the songs are usually slight, diffuse, supple and pretty little trifles of kraut-psych wonder. When Moyer or Andre sings lead, the tracks begin to sound like a fourth-grader making fun of you. In Supersystem, Moyer's nasal yawp was put to good use, bouncing around in that band's sometimes-glorious, always-furious dancepunk clutter. In Antelope's geometric openness, though, that voice has nowhere to hide. Tracks like "Justin Jesus" sound informed by Lungfish without actually rocking at all, a hard thing to pull off, and his lyrics tend toward inscrutable bullshit: "Pisces in the breach/ An elemental monument to mirth/ A psychic stand/ Three-fingered hand." And so Reflector is a curious document of a band at a crossroads. Right now, they're half of a good band. If they let Elvy take over completely, they could blossom into a melting mountain of gooey beauty. If Moyer and/or Andre takes control, they'll march onward toward unlistenability. And if they continue to split duties, they'll keep churning out slight and half-decent albums like this one. Knowing D.C., though, they'll probably break up before moving in any of those directions.
