When Tessa Murray sings "Stuck in a time machine/ That was just a dream," on "Cuckoo", the lead-off track from Still Corners' Creatures of an Hour, she sums up much of the dreamy, 1960s-obsessed band's most obvious attributes. London-based Still Corners are something of a transatlantic hybrid: American Greg Hughes began the band when he met Murray in London, and they grew to a quartet shortly afterwards. There was a long spell between their debut EP Remember Pepper? and last year's sweetly jangly single "Don't Fall in Love", but their first full-length, Creatures of an Hour, is a cohesive statement of the band's aesthetic-- nouvelle-vague-nodding retro-cool. Fashioning the most familiar signifiers of 60s style in a contemporary frame, Creatures of an Hour is a perfect soundtrack for the internet's vast acreage of Anna Karina Tumblrs.
Which makes a certain kind of sense: Still Corners like movies. They talk in interviews about the inspiration they draw from their favorite kinds of films (Italian horror, French New Wave, and anything soundtracked by Ennio Morricone), and their music often gets tagged with that puzzlingly synesthesiac adjective "cinematic." It calls to mind the way earlier this year the internet was buzzing with talk about Dirty Beaches' Badlands, a record that drew more comparisons to like-minded filmmakers (David Lynch, Wong Kar Wai) than musicians. It seemed to signal something about the way we listen to music now-- the importance of the audio-visual experience in making aesthetic connections in a digital music scene flooded with new artists.
Still Corners' most prominent touchstone, though, is a band that, even a decade ago, sounded like they were making soundtracks to imaginary French New Wave classics. The influence of Broadcast is evident all over Creatures of an Hour, from the eerie carnival synths of "Circulars" to the chilly, music-box plink of "The White Season". It's perhaps unfair to hold a band's first record up to the high-water mark of their idols-- and especially brutal since most of us are still reeling from singer Trish Keenan's untimely passing. But since they draw overtly from Broadcast's overall aesthetic, Murray's vocals cannot but fall flat under the inevitable comparison the rest of their sound evokes. She sings each track in a breathy exhale like she's trying to fog up a car window. All of which sounds lovely, but there's not enough substance or personality in the vocals she displays on these tracks to transcend her influences-- or to be very memorable at all.
Creatures of an Hour is top-heavy: the early-sequenced "Cuckoo" and "Endless Summer" are the record's incontestable highlights. The rest of the music lacks specificity: No particular melodies, images, or moods really stick out from the vast, dreamy atmosphere that washes over you while you're listening. Creatures is a nice dream-- certainly not an unpleasant place to be. But its resounding vagueness becomes apparent once you wake: It's not exactly going to make for a rip-roaring entry in your dream journal or anything.
