Big city alienation is a feeling so universal and yet so rich that nearly every re-telling of the experience still offers something new. Hymns' Travel in Herds is full of songs about displacement and loneliness, but it renders its subjects and speakers so anonymous that they fail to tap into this vein of common urban experience. Instead its vague gestures towards the contradictions and terrors of living in the city come off muted and timid. The record resonates only so far as it can rely on easy-breezy, Southern rock charm, which is too bad: Warm horns and outsider dread should make an interesting combination. Hymns, whose members live in NYC but are originally from Texas and North Carolina, recorded Travel in Herds at a Lone Star ranch with an assortment of instruments their sparser debut, 2006's Brother/Sister, lacks. Though the added timbres are welcome, saxophone, organ and banjo can't entirely make up for the lack of imagination the band employs in their structures and lyrics.
Like many just-all right albums, it offers its best track, "I Can't Be What U Want", early on. Singer Brian Harding affably breezes through nursery-school grade rhymes over the song's New Orleans horn stabs and banjo. That same breeziness coats the whole record, even as the subject turns to cross-country ennui. Hymns keep a light touch: New York is scary, happy and/or pretty; in L.A. you've got "nothing to lose." "I told you what you wanted to hear," Harding sings on "Streets Alone", and here it's smooth sax, benign and easy as the rest of the album's songs. Hymns hit something of a stride in the second half. Though the line still end in monosyllabic pap, "Train Song" soothes any anxieties there; you can't feel malicious toward something as pliable and watery as its pedal steel. The title track's title line-- "We travel in herds/ We mix up our words"-- doesn't reveal anything about Hymns' intentions, but the piano march is a nice change from the acoustic alt-country goo.Also like many just-all right albums, Travel in Herds ends with an unnecessarily long track, "On the Run". It's also the first time we get to hear where Hymns wanted to go. Harding raises his voice here, in something approaching anger; organs chime in behind, crescendos crescendo, then a saxophone surfs over it all, a smooth sax. While it's not exactly exhilarating, "On the Run" could serve as compass leading the band a little further from the comfort of home. It may not be the big city, but at least it's not the middle of the road.
