Snowglobe formed in 1999 in Athens, Georgia, but relocated to Memphis early on, where the members have mostly remained since. To listen to the band's records, though, they may as well have never moved. You can still hear Athens in their stuffed, Technicolor indie rock, and their time spent around members of the old Elephant 6 collective is the primary shaper of their sound even today. It's an interesting exercise to go through their five albums in order, ending with this one, and consider where the indie rock mainstream was in relation to this band for each of them. When they were first starting out, they were on the fringe, but their style of emotionally straightforward, heavily arranged music has become one of the defining sounds of indie rock.
And oddly, as things have shifted further their way, they've started to take their sound in a less ornate direction. Little More Lived In has songs as elaborate as any on the band's past albums, but it also brings in more overt classic rock and country influences. In one sense it's the band's most Southern album, with its copious use of banjo, splashes of harmonica, and occasionally twangy vocals. The unfortunate thing about this shift is that the band winds up with a record that's half modern psych, half classic rock-inflected indie, and the disconnect is pretty audible. The contrast is especially sharp on the transition from "Dad" to "Tim's Piano", where the band ends one of the most humble, unpretentious songs I've heard all year-- a dryly recorded acoustic guitar-and-harmonica tribute to a father that ends with the line "I love you, Dad"-- and proceeds immediately to an instrumental soaked in reverb and choral backing vocals. Both are decent pieces of music, but they sound worlds apart.
The band bridges its opposing impulses in places-- the psychedelic backing vocals that balance the buzzing guitar solo and bouncing banjo of "Teenage Queen", for instance-- but the one place where they attempt an outright merger, on closer "Land Brains", is a bit messy, roughing up a long build with a sudden outburst of hoedown banjo and steel guitar that feels forced. Snowglobe seem to be a band in transition on Little More Lived In, trying to find a way to grow beyond the orch-pop niche they've occupied for so long. They're mostly successful in the endeavor here, but it might take one more record to get the balance of elements exactly right.
