"Safe for the Time Being", the last song on Mason Proper's second album, Olly Oxen Free, begins slightly out of focus-- not jarringly so, but just bleary and blurry enough to catch your attention as your ears try to orient themselves. A synth wobbles. A bass drum rumbles. A voice (or sample of a voice) warbles along. A reverb-drenched guitar arpeggio vies with a fuzzy bass to give the track direction, which singer Jonathan Visger refuses to provide with his yelpy and uneasy vocal melody. "Fog", the first song on the album, is stately and more subdued, less amorphous. The drums plod at an uncommitted trot, the guitars occasionally lock into something more forceful. The elusive vocals and airy keyboards meet somewhere in the ether, mysterious and majestic yet modest all the same.
These tracks are striking and spooky bookends to a disc that swings both ways. One moment it plays it safe with the relatively straight indie rock of "Point A to Point B" or the fitfully funky "Only a Moment", and then it becomes loose and abstract on "In the Mirror" or the consciously unbalanced "Downpour" (sort of indie-rock screwed and chopped). Surely the all-encompassing shadow of Radiohead falls on this record, but it's equally reminiscent of the hazy art-rock of TV on the Radio (with whom "Olly Oxen Free" shares producer/engineer Chris Coady). Certainly a track like "Alone" makes the band sound like it's dined a few times at the Cookie Mountain Buffet.
Of course, the Ypsilanti, Mich., group isn't a match for those aforementioned acts, at least not yet, but they do demonstrate a similar ability to make weirdness seem normal, and normal seem weird. Witness "In the Mirror", which begins mournful but slowly evolves into something uneasier, or "Out Dragging the River", a simple slow-jam that gradually but only very subtly ups the energy of the skeletal arrangement, like clouds gently parting to reveal the sun peeking out.
Compared to songs such as these, the propulsive "Shiny" and the angular "Only a Moment" at first seem conspicuously conventional, but even these tracks go some strange places that save them from a more mundane fate. Yet one of the strengths of the disc is that its many eccentricities don't come off as cloying, look-at-me affectations. Rather, both band and album alike seem genuinely interested in keeping the sonic see-saw teetering, never fully touching ground at either end, preferring to straddle the constantly unsteady fulcrum in between.
