The greatest blessing in life isn't health, wealth, or longevity-- it's low expectations. This works both ways-- when others expect little of you, it's easy to achieve an acceptable result because anything short of failure will be deemed success. Likewise, when you don't anticipate quality, you're more likely to be pleasantly surprised-- case in point: The Firebird Band's City at Night.
I had deflated expectations of The Firebird Band for a reason: They lowered their own bar with 2001's lousy Drive EP. (Their more rock-oriented debut album, The Setting Sun & Its Satellites, was slightly better, but also disorganized.) The EP was such a cloudy mess that when the band didn't quickly follow it up, I figured it must have dropped off the face of the earth. Well, it turns out that the band-- a duo comprising ex-Braid guitarist Chris Broach and John Isberg-- had been holed up in studios and living rooms creating City at Night, which is a wholesale facelift and improvement. It's not a perfect record by any means--in fact I'd go so far as to say that nearly every song is too long, and a 74-minute running time gives it plenty of space to wear out its welcome-- but the basic material is strong and the new sound is seductive.
True to its title and cover art (on which I can see the building in which I work), City at Night is a slick, urban album that feeds off the energy of streetlights, neon signs, and cool, brisk air. It's hard to listen to half of these songs without picturing Mitsubishis speeding through downtown tunnels in silver-green monochrome, their cabins packed with well-proportioned young urban professionals going God knows where...maybe nowhere. Mechanical beats with live accompaniment do most of the heavy lifting as the band piles on synths, guitars, basses, keyboards, and vocals, occasionally hinting at punk but never quite detouring all the way. The seagull synths that announce opener "Obsessive Compulsive" set the album's midnight clubland mood. That song is one of the best here, a propulsive piece of post-disco that finds Broach in fine vocal form, somewhere between The Faint's Todd Baechle and The Fire Show's M. Resplendent.
Songs like "Dangerous", which features vocals by Elizabeth Black, and "Los Angeles" are decent examples of how the band stretches good ideas too far-- they each drag on because of grueling repetition. It's a shame, too, because "Dangerous" has a stellar chorus and great vocal turn by Black, while "Los Angeles" rides a sickly sweet Rhodes vamp (sadly, into the ground). Meanwhile, the heavily filtered, almost jungle-based pop of "Can't Stop" really needs to be a two-minute experiment and winds up going twice that distance with no real payoff.
The band only slips into a terrible idea once, and that's on "Wake Up", which opens as a fairly nasty post-punk explosion but takes an ill-advised dive into hip-hop that sounds forced and awkward; guests rappers JB and Urban Myth of Kerbloki don't fit the tone of the album. The Firebird Band also take less-than-successfull forays into eclecticism on the acoustic ballad "Art" and the Chiba City doom and gloom of "Tokyo", which uncomfortably rub up against one another. They're not bad songs, but they don't feel at home here either.
In the LP's liner notes, the band claims this album is the first in a three-part series. Presuming the band sticks to their new electro direction, one hopes they add concision to the equation because one of the things holding City at Night back is its longwindedness. The Firebird Band have come a long way in the last three years, but they still have a little bit of ground to cover before they're all the way there.
