This exploration of drone, punk, and rock is Airiel's first full-length release after their Winks and Kisses series of EPs released in 2003 and 2004. The Battle of Sealand has obviously allowed the band to expand its vision, perhaps too widely. The flanging sustains of "Introduction", an immediate recollection of My Bloody Valentine, owe just as much to shoegazing pioneers Ride and even crossover radio acts like the Verve and Oasis-- if only because of Cory Osborne's vocal inflections, the band, based in Chicago, sounds undeniably British.
Many of the songs are too calculated, melodically speaking, and too emotive not to betray an indebtedness to punk, but the question is really not who's being referenced (a great slew), but to what degree this variety of songs can be enjoyed. It's a bit too soon to bring back the early 1990s, but this is what the band is unwittingly after, the pleasure being mostly derived from the moments when Airiel-- and we-- are carried away, somewhere in between the whiney slides of "Thrown Idols" and its guttural shreds and passionate falsettos. The production is a bonus-- well mastered, glossy, and clean, displaying every key change and genre shift, every piece in the nostalgic puzzle.
"You Kids Should Know Better" wants to get angry in a Kasabian kind of way, with howling, echoic, staccato vocal notes piercing an overstuffed atmosphere of what might be 35 layers of guitar-based noise, the effect being that either my volume is too high or the band made a little too much effort: "Let's add a sixth bass track identical to the other five," and so forth. "Mermaid in a Manhole" is likable for its barebones reference to grunge and its title-- just one example of how the band appears to fret about the sweet stuff on the surface, but brutally masks any of the nonsense with their impressive command of a large hubbub of toiling instruments.
But there are eleven tracks on this album and a large number of them are the shy kids squeezed between the rambunctious bullies; the resulting disjuncture being, if you're in the mood for it, a kind of solace, but also a kind of joke. Just how were these tracks selected, and why? "Stay", perhaps inexplicably my favorite, is a sonic spinning of cotton candy, complete with smooth, aerated alto vocals from Osborne and the usual mix of guitar-drum-bass, here content to repeat essentially the same patterns: simple ascents in aurally pleasing key signatures. But they've made the crucial addition of strings, which suggests that the song is either an artifact of the band's early days or a new experiment that the thrashers weren't interested in exploring further. Here's where the instruments move more typically, guitars simply plucked, bows pulled from end to end, and vocal notes stretched. "Stay" is a far cry from the frothy shifts of a song like "Peoria", which is so interested in the wall of noise as to make the vocals a polyphony of churchy harmonies hanging out. The voices share a couple of notes with the instruments, but mainly hover in a porous, unresolved area of the scale, settling on a common note (or seven at once) for the final measure.
"The Release" is both a more sophisticated (dirtily produced, independently labeled) Good Charlotte track and a Drunken Boat throwback, with fierce, caffeinated drum work and a simpler, less-is-more melodic structure. The repeated line, "I'm giving you up" is the melodic essence of the song, the instruments bowing to its urgency instead of taking over the whole scene with a tidal wave of messy ceremony. This song, despite its slithery shifts and rather unpleasant ambiance, convinces us that it's doing what it set out to. Some of these tracks are so full of effort and pomp as to lose the listener's attention, while the successful ones immerse us in an awfully mired, tense, yet pretty world, where even recent contributions to musical history are savored and studied like fossils.
