Marrow have been making the rounds in Chicago venues for a few years now, and even though they're still in their very early twenties, the band's members have impressive resumes. Lead singers Macie Stewart has toured with Chance the Rapper and Liam Kazar with Tweedy, and both were members of the now defunct hip-hop group Kids These Days. Still, even with their city’s cred behind them, Marrow is very much a blank slate.
The Gold Standard doesn’t feel like a cohesive debut statement by any means. You get the sense the band was trying to display range, settling for writing an album filled with certain types of songs rather than a unified collective vision. They can do classic rock on "She Chose You", they’re Edward Sharpe-leaning faux-folk on "Ocean of Glory", and then spinning apocalyptic, Hozier-sounding ballads with songs like "Cities" and "Leave Grounds Stay".
Marrow tout themselves as being schooled in jazz and classical, and it’s something you can hear consistently in how they compose their songs. The group likes using a diverse smattering of instrumentals, from horn arrangements to classical piano to violins and harp. It’s like they made a list of what sounds they wanted on the record and then ordered them up like a diner’s Hungry Man Special, though it doesn’t feel like overkill.
There’s an authentic-sounding tinkering, improvisational quality that emanates throughout The Gold Standard’s instrumentals; music boxes break down on "Darling Divine", cowbells ring and guiros scratch at the tail end of the "Mother of Maladies", a xylophone dings under an electric guitar solo on "Quarter to Three". Though, this improv quality becomes their downfall when it sounds like they got stuck in a groove and couldn’t get out. "Corsicana" plays like a completely anonymous and derivative piano ballad and the nearly six-minute "The Gold Standard" is severely tedious, coming off like a somber pre-performance guitar tuning with slow percussion before erupting into repetitive, roaring guitar solos.
Still, there are diamonds here. The album’s lead single "Paulson" is a furious, head-banging, shred-heavy rock song with Stewart’s voice like a bolt of lightning; you can practically see the spotlight on her. The charming "Mother of Maladies", carried by a peppy organ melody, is sweet, waltzing in a sort of theatrical romance as Stewart sings of how love feels. "Every night I am with you, I feel it/ Every night’s not every night enough," she sings. And as ho-dunk as "Ocean of Glory" might be ("You could make love to me when I’m older/ You’re a bootstrap, I’ll pull you closer," Stewart and Kazar sing), at the five-minute mark the song feels like opening a trap door and finding a party as it wigs out into frantic psychedelia.
You wonder why they didn’t make a whole new song; then again, letting a saccharine, cult-evoking sing-along dissolve into a shrilly-sung wacky trip isn’t an entirely bad move either. Still, on the whole, The Gold Standard feels like Marrow are in the midst of trying to define their sound, throwing things at the wall and seeing what will stick. They're a band that can build a great three-minute song, but they lose themselves in the construction of anything bigger.
