While it's certainly not as egregious as a shitty nu-grunge band naming itself Godsmack or some emo-inclined Morrissey acolytes calling themselves Girl in a Coma, Chapel Hill's the Old Ceremony does lay plain one of its most prominent influences with their choice of name. New Skin for the Old Ceremony is among the most revered entries in the distinguished catalogue of Leonard Cohen, whose darkly elegant approach to pop serves as clear (though by no means lone) inspiration for this noir-ish act that takes its name from his 1974 album. Clearly this isn't a band that shies away from its essential nature or refuses to admit its antecedents. Singer and principal songwriter Django Haskins has even acknowledged in interviews the seeming inevitability of his choosing to play guitar after having been named for the legendary Django Reinhardt. That attitude of acceptance and comfortableness in one's skin permeates the Old Ceremony's newest album, Walk on Thin Air, a mature, assured effort that finds the group confronting some of life's most grim and intractable realities with honest humility and patient deliberation.
Such attributes aren't typical ingredients for high-octane rock'n'roll, and sure enough the Old Ceremony's music matches the confident care of the band's internal dynamic. An act that can swell to a dozen players in concert and has built a sartorial reputation by wearing suits onstage, the dapper Carolinians take a standard rock ensemble and dress it up with moody, stately things like violins and vibraphones. It's a tactic that adds dignity to the title track and the quietly devastating "Murmur", yet it can just as easily make the album feel like an overly buttoned-down affair, as when the group lets strings awkwardly riff on "Same Difference" or evokes the more grievous banalities of various 70s piano men on "Stubborn Man". For the most part, however, the orchestral elements in songs like "Plate Tectonics", "The Disappear", and "Ready to Go" simply serve as subtle yet distinguished reminders that these are grown-ass men playing these songs, working through life's problems with highball glasses in hand.
The Old Ceremony's music can feel unsettled and even slightly disorienting (check the organs on "By Any Other Name"), but it's only because the band is pushing up so closely against some pretty frightening truths. Somewhat paradoxically, it takes real self-possession to even meet these uncertainties head-on, accounting for the steady grace of songs like "Plate Tectonics", which correlates the inevitable disasters of love with the shifting of the earth, and "By Any Other Name", which ponders the futility and uncontrollableness of language. Haskins does play up brooding noir a bit too broadly on "Ready to Go" and "Don't Parade Your Scars" and particularly goes overboard on "The Disappear", a plodding, punch-drunk song about escaping the workaday world that makes me start to worry I was wrong about the National all along (though I still think the Brooklynites are more clever than this). Then again, such overly stylized transgressions are rendered easily forgivable by the humbly affecting bewilderment of "Someone I Used to Know", which marvels at the inevitable but no less baffling changes that time effects on past lovers whom we once thought we understood completely. The fact that change is one of the most fundamental of all constants is just another of the ironies that the members of the Old Ceremony wisely perceive, and even more wisely refuse to pretend they've mastered.
