Portland's 31Knots have always been as slippery as frontman Joe Haege's guitar leads. The power trio's music reconciles math-rock's complexity and pop's punch, emo's tendon-popping angst and soul's melismatic swing, post-punk's jagged grooves and indie rock's shaggy melodies. All of this makes them worth keeping an ear on despite their spotty discography. They founder whenever their emo inclinations become too pronounced-- and, as emo tends to be the bull in any china shop it enters, their up-and-down output sags a bit toward the "down" side. But things are looking up: Worried Well is 31Knots' most consistent album since 2003's vigorous It Was High Time to Escape.
On Worried Well, inventive song structures balancing hooky indie rock and studio-geek wizardry recall Modest Mouse, if they were fronted by a lungy belter in the Jason Molina vein rather than a mealy-mouthed croaker. As always, 31Knots dangerously skirt the line between conviction and too much, sometimes running roughshod over it. But you've got to give them credit for keeping things relatively loose and lean around the 10-year mark of their career, when many bands of their ilk start piling on the leaden string charts.
Acknowledging that nothing but flag-waving burners stuffed with slithery licks-- see "Certificate" and "Worried but Not Well"-- makes for enervating and monotonous albums, 31Knots nestle set pieces into and between songs, most of which are imbued with a genuine vitality and keep the album from bogging down. "Baby of Riots" opens the album with a confetti-burst of amp buzz and hand claps. "The Breaks" forgoes surging guitar chords in favor of organ fuzz and a dubby rhythm section. The underwater dirge "Take Away the Landscape" flirts with ambient music, and album highlight "Strange Kicks" has a piano-and-breakbeats feel very similar to Alaska in Winter's "Balkan Lowrider Anthem". "Compass Commands" rolls with barrelhouse piano, while "Statistics and the Heart of Man" bookends elaborate guitar whorls with passages of modernist stasis.
This is clearly a band with some musicology under its collective belt, and its members have the technical skill to fold their diverse interests into guitar rock without forcing anything; the surprises come fast and, often, satisfyingly. But Haege's big voice puts a lot of emphasis on the prolix lyrics, which remain dismal. His cloudy pretensions float humorlessly above the eloquent music, threatening to overshadow it. I understand the need to pad out a bar sometimes, but if "rejection," won't fit, there's got to be a better solution than "the opposite of acceptance." The second-person condemnation that opens the album-- "You married your money and look what became..."-- sets the pedantic tone; the ideological thrust (capitalism sucks, conformity sucks, all kinds of things suck) has merit but is rendered with such self-righteous opacity and metaphysical hoopla as to gall any but the stoned-est teen poet. Haege says too much and not enough at once; if he ever manages to strike the same deft balance between bombast and nuance that he does instrumentally, 31Knots will be a much more formidable band.
