My knowledge of the Tampa metro area is limited to historically inept professional sports teams and a prevalence of the elderly, so I won't be so foolish to suggest that there's such thing as a "Tampa sound." But judging from the sort of bands that catch on with the New Granada imprint, one could argue that it's almost like an indie Houston where bands name themselves like rappers and prefer absorbing Codeine to downing drank. As was the case with Candy Bars on their fantastic 2006 record, Zillionaire debuts with a brazenly 1990s slow flow appropriate for the coldest stretch of the year, or at least people who were into "indie" before the palefaces all got into that beat-driven stuff.
The uncluttered arrangements are easy enough to pick apart: unhurried tempos, wallflower vocals, and the sort of clean octave/third chords favored by early Smashing Pumpkins or current Silversun Pickups. And at this point, it's difficult not to associate Zillionaire with slowcore-ish superheroes. "I Won't Let You Down (This Time)" swishes between two queasy chords like the first five seconds of "Ten Years Gone" stretched to infinity, while Heath Dupras intones "Get your shotgun...make sure it's loaded" as if each repetition multiplies the intended portent. Things get genuinely discomforting as the overdubs chime in, but it makes for a curious first step, particularly in relief of its follow-up, "Loose Leaf". That the album title includes "Turn", "The", and "Lights", brings to mind a pretty obvious touchstone, and Zillionaire does a decent job of reenacting some of Interpol's more zippy moments, albeit without the cavernous reverb or the urbanite sexual malaise that eventually were revealed as load-bearing. It's a far better fit than "Tonight Will Be Alright", which tries to cop a feel in that sweetly awkward record-nerd way (see: And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out) but with strangely unbalanced harmonies and placeholder rhymes ("tonight"/ "alright," "song,"/ "singalong"), it's legitimately awkward...like having someone ask you to dance at a Yo La Tengo show.
What Zillionaire is far more adept at during this go-through is their ability to suggest mood with the comfort of being sad, often when they split the difference between clock-stoppers and foot-tappers. "The Occasion of the Water Heater" provides the record's most gorgeous moments, flickering with sad delay and atypically demure invocation of loss-- "You won't ever know what it feels like when you try/ It's a scam but it gets you every time." Over its seven minutes of dour New Year's Eve recollections, "Jesus Told Me So" builds to a noisy climax obvious from two towns over from a near free-time pulse, but its tundric space leaves enough to the imagination to avoid becoming ponderous. And while The Street Lights technically ends up with a friends-and-family-only 20-minute drone, "New Cymbal" is a more fitting endpoint, with Dupras at his most vulnerable, falling apart over the band's most bittersweet arrangement.
If it sounds like I'm selling these guys short, it comes with the caveat of playing another black-and-white game: easy to learn, hard to master. Had Zillionaire traded in their feathery guitar willows for acoustic strums, we'd probably be talking about their "hushed intimacy" or some such, but as it is, The Street Lights Have Been Turned Down is the sort of thing where it will be tough to block out imagined concertgoer talk poking into the moments of silence. If this results in a pushier, more forceful Zillionaire, the next time around could be something special.
