Let It Rest, Chapel Hill quartet Sorry About Dresden's second full-length album begins promisingly with "Beds and Lawns," a CCR screamer that drifts around a four-second, ozone-piercing guitar screech, evoking endless southern pastures and balls-to-the-wall guitar rock. But sustaining such beauty is a mug's game reserved for the effortlessly genius, and Sorry About Dresden, no matter how adept they may be at strumming and pounding their instruments, fall victim to gravity immediately after coming down for this promising high.
What makes "Beds and Lawns" most successful is its bridge, a melody that I swear shows up in close to one-half of the heartbreak new wave I heard as a kid. Something along the lines of stopping the world and melting with a person you really, really like. Sorry About Dresden are hardly new wave, which makes that mental connection all the more striking; in a way, they represent a kind of rock pastiche, in which the sources are plentiful and beg to be identified, but are tweaked enough from their original contexts that each remains too difficult to properly label and file away.
Still, my first inclination while listening to Let It Rest was to adapt myself to the task of some musical archivist, to properly identity the objects and carry them back to my writer's nest. And I'll say this: Wracking my brain for the names of a million blurred faces I saw open for Superchunk ten years ago, this was the one time I envied overtanned Sugar Ray vocalist Mark McGrath, because apparently, he kills at Rock-n-Roll Jeopardy. I eventually came to realize three things: there are moments that remind me vaguely of The Psychedelic Furs; some choruses join the hundreds of drunken refrains stolen from The Replacements; and singer Matt Oberst's vocal pacing, on occasion, reeks of Elvis Costello with post-nasal drip. Oberst's voice has a youthful gruffness, like a teenager who smokes too much: not quite world-weary, but scratchy and maligned enough to convey emotions beyond his years.
Let me relate a quick analogy: The other day I was walking down East 61st in midtown Manhattan, during a very icy snowstorm, when I heard a bird singing in a bald tree. I stopped and looked for it, trying to establish a defining characteristic within the otherwise monotonous white landscape: a tiny, distinct fragment deserving my attention. There's nothing on Let It Rest so inviting, and I find that surprising for a band that's been around a few years and earned a slot on a small but well-known independent label.
Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised by SAD's mediocrity, or the begging acronym their name makes for. With such a renown brother, we know Matt Oberst didn't have a long road to hoe, but looking at Mike Kinsella's Owen and American Football material, you can't let that slide. Sorry About Dresden are a weak opening act in a circuit filled with superior headliners, a band lacking any distinguishing characteristics in the oversaturated world of mid-tempo anglophile pop.
