Fifteen months since Electrelane's last full-length, and they're already back with another one. Credit's due for making that seem like the natural way to go. Most bands this stylish would follow a record like The Power Out with more time at home, working up pop singles and plotting for buzz. These four, though: They stay as The Wire-friendly as they are photogenic. They head straight back to Steve Albini's Chicago studio and spend a couple months patiently developing the corners of their sound.
Which gives us Axes: Thirteen largely instrumental tracks that see these women plowing happily into the groove. The routine's as simple and chic as always, starting slow and then building up into a race. But where their elegant melodies once had people comparing them to Stereolab, Albini's band-in-a-room production exposes more affinity with the Krautrock that fueled Stereolab in the first place. Figure in Electrelane's rock-band grounding, and the usual clich gets reversed: This is like Neu! not on acid-- a concrete, de-psychedelicized, unfuturistic indie drone.
When it works, it's because of all those quirks pushing in at the edges of the band's sound-- quirks this album is all about exploring. There's the mall-lobby piano that cropped up on The Power Out, which emerges here as an even stronger component. Same goes for the Chicago A Cappella Choir, who pop up at the end of "Suitcase" for one of the album's most impressive arrangements. And lo, unfuturism: Best of all is Verity Susman's ongoing Old Europe fixation, the same one that had her nicking lyrics from sixteenth-century Spanish poets and the band doing one photo shoot looking like Rosicrucian falconers. "Eight Steps" goes from Parisian harmonium rag to German piano sonata and back, and some form of European-history rock seems to have been born.
So it starts well. Susman sings her way through two singles as sharp as anything from last year, and the grooves they dig into immediately afterward are just as captivating, in texture and composition both. It's only in the center that some old doubts emerge. This band, after all, is likeable, "credible," and sonically stylish, and when too many tracks build to their inevitable rave-ups, it's easy to start wondering if sometimes that's all that's on offer: It fills in the air and it certainly sounds right, but how much is actually happening in there? There are certain lines between making this stuff sing and just jamming through it for practice, and said lines do get rather trod upon.
After a lull like that, it's a credit to the record's final quarter that it can win you back, with banjo and horn figures on "Come Back" sounding almost like the Books, and choir and organ raving their way beautifully out through the closer. Electrelane-as-pop fans may miss Susman's voice when she hops behind the piano or the harmonium and puts time in on arranging the album's textures. But that elegant instrumental pulse is as uniquely theirs as it ever was, and credit's due for doing exactly what we always say bands like this should be doing: Putting their heads down and patiently developing their most original ideas. The results might be a little thin on actual "essential" moments, but they're working in the right direction.
