Reading Rainbow are Sarah Everton and Rob Garcia, musical and romantic partners who share a love of indie pop, vintage children's television, and raw kale. When Spinner asked the Philadelphia pair to name their vices earlier this year, Everton drew a blank: "I'm sure if I thought long enough I could come up with something." Garcia confessed that he's usually too exhausted from his day job as a green engineer to dabble in the devil's work. Not surprising for a couple of avowed health-food nuts and dedicated home recorders. Fortunately their sophomore album, Prism Eyes (following 2009's Mystical Participation), doesn't suffer from its conspicuous absence of rock'n'roll excess.
Prism Eyes works within many of the garage-punk tropes championed by Best Coast, Wavves, Dum Dum Girls, and others: hollow-bucket beats, screw-loose guitar rattle, and canyons of reverb. Primitive playing serves runaway trains like "Underground" well. In the song's exhilarating one-minute-and-change span, the band locates maybe two chords on the fretboard and stands on tippy toes reaching for vocal counterparts. Musical virtuosos they aren't. But Everton and Garcia have a tight grip on what makes indie pop tick-- sincerity, enthusiasm, and a catchy chorus. The duo alternates between plain unison singing and scrappy, handmade harmonies, which suggests a larger cast of characters and gives the songs a communal "all together now" vibe-- kind of like the group-hug feeling of a Glee finale, sans choreography and teen divas.
Hazy, undefined nostalgia is Reading Rainbow's stock-in-trade. And when Everton and Garcia work with rose-colored 1960s pop sounds and feisty punk 'tude, the results are wonderful. Not so when they capitulate to the false imperative to write slow, ballady songs in a vaguely 50s prom mode (what, for the sake of historical diversity?). Soggy duet "Let's Dream Tonight" never rises above formal exercise, because it lacks the emotional conviction of the album's brighter, uptempo numbers. But that's a relatively minor demerit, and Prism Eyes' winners far outnumber its skip tracks. Maybe it's the season, or maybe I've grown weary of a musical landscape scorched by twitchy dubstep, witchhouse drones, icy synths, and apocalyptic visions, but comfort and joy sounds awfully appealing right now.
