I have a friend. Since he's fictional, I call him as I wish: Marshall. Well, Marshall has a few hang-ups, one of which is Barsuk Records. He can't forgive them for unveiling Death Cab's white-collared weeping on the world. He curses their blue-eyed histrionics in a well-lubed monologue. The age-old frailty, thy name is Gibbard diatribe. Marshall un-surprised me earlier this week when I put on one of Barsuk's latest releases and he started sputtering again. Goth is the new glam; it's our generation's adopted grunge; c'est le nouveau garage. That Marshall. He's so coy when alliterative.
But he's right. On their second release, Battery, the Seattle quartet Aveo has Phil Ek manning the boards again, and the results, while perhaps more wide-sprung, sound all-too familiar. Time, that ever-degrading barometer for pop music, has caught up with them. In 2001, their Brit-derived goth-punk was just gaining a foothold and still felt like a novel reinvention; now, its dreary slog is as commonplace as three-chord punk after the millennium's turn.
Still, if the timing is a bit suspect (and, remember: this is their second album), technically, Aveo prove sure-handed purveyors of sounds never far gone from pop. Woking, Surrey and all of its punchdrunk-Who-punk of the late 70s is ably represented, just as surely as those indie-darlings The Smiths and The Cure. Cranky guitars grind against the sedate echolalia of these harmonies, and they occasionally manage to enfold you in prickly gossamer. When it works ("The Idiot on the Bike"), rudeboys and marble-eyed teens in thick-eyeliner exist in a tense, unshown turmoil where the chords laid out for each join without dissent.
But most of the time, their discord seems falsely summoned, as though choreographed for a fight scene where fists sweep three feet of air and never smack chin. Marshall calls it Chicken Little Fright. He might say that music this oppressive needs room to suffocate itself. On Battery, Aveo poke just enough holes through their thick guitars and smoky atmospheres to let in unwanted air. You're never stifled or left to gasp, and so when the dense, grimy textures they're creating fail, you hear only their Cleaveresque veneer.
The album's centerpiece, "Fistfights with Mr. G", offers the ideal illustration of these pitfalls. After building a candlewaxed ballad up from the ground, lead singer William Wilson uncurls the line, "I'll take him with one kick between his bony thighs." Marshall and I exchange a giggle. Actually, we keep rewinding the song to that point and joining in with our Fraggle Rock falsettos. The song's labyrinthine guitar work and pulsing keyboards crumble underneath this odd disjunction between hymnal sentience and kick-in-the-craw lyricism. It's somewhat like Frank Zappa fronting Joy Division, "Mudshark" grunted out atop "Disorder". Confusion settles in, but here it has no recourse to the musical buzzword of the last two years: irony. Instead, it's impotent with cheap fuck-the-man irreverence, and "Mr. G" lays down limp and stringbeaned atop the song's now-lost transcendence.
As Battery spins through its final waltz, Marshall contemplates the pulp of his thumbflesh. He says the whorls remind him of a cartographical system still undiscovered. It's obvious that Aveo, with its tardy amalgam of Cure-rock, has him rethinking Barsuk. It's not enough to forgive them for Gibbard's gum-toothed melancholy, but it may prove a serviceable distraction. Anything to quell his monomania.
