Athens, Ga., quintet Venice Is Sinking emerged in 2006 with what might be best described as a pleasant surprise: debut album Sorry About the Flowers showcased a band with some solid songwriting chops and a brand of earthy chamber pop that was easy to root for. Rather than refine the rough edges of Flowers, however, Venice Is Sinking have charted a different course with Azar, their 2009 follow-up-- though anyone who paid close attention to the intro to "Undecided" or stuck around to hear "Blue by Late", the 19-minute ambient track that closed Sorry About the Flowers, might have seen this coming.
Azar is structured around four electronics-heavy instrumental movements spread across the album, what we might collectively call the "Azar Suite". "Azar One", with its warm, impressionist tonal swaths eventually given shape by steady march drumming, suggests Explosions in the Sky gone Pure Moods, shot through with just the slightest touch (no pun intended) of Fennesz. "Two" takes the main theme into more delicate, twilit territory, and "Three" introduces tape manipulation chatter, while "Four", which begins as somber undersea waltz as performed on some phantom player piano, only turns more gloomily nostalgic with the introduction of strings. Taken together the suite conjures some pretty big, cinematic imagery-- too big, as it turns out, for the still-modest indie pop in between.
See, the problem here, and what makes Azar a more satisfying listen in parts than as a whole, is the rather epic disconnect between the "Azar" bits and the seven actual songs that comprise the blood and guts of the album. Take "Young Master Sunshine" as an example: the track sports an Elephant 6-esque title and comes in a pretty package, with an elegant swaying tempo and a horn- and string-saturated outro reminiscent of Okkervil River, but is ultimately sunk by a chorus-- constructed of slight variations on the line "It's not enough/ But sometimes it's more than enough"-- too bland and ambiguous to leave much of an impression. It's not for want of trying; while Karolyn Troupe's viola-playing anchored most of the tracks on Sorry, here it's almost an afterthought amid a sound rich with horns, woodwinds, percussion, and atmospheric flourishes. Yet more often than not the grand arrangements tend to smear together rather than punctuate specific moments, and overall these more cautiously optimistic tracks lack the weight of their determinedly melancholy counterparts on Flowers. In short, this is still a small band with some big ideas.
Despite its flaws, however, Azar feels like a necessary step for Venice Is Sinking. They're getting their feet wet with some new sounds and departing from the fairly strict structure that kept Flowers engaging but prevented it from ever truly soaring, and one gets the sense that the lessons learned here have the potential to foster some really exceptional material from these guys in the future. And indeed, the band has already cut a third, decidedly less produced album-- recorded live to tape at a local theater subsequently destroyed by fire-- so it's clear they're not just going to fall back on their day jobs for now and hope Azar catches on. They're already trying a new look, and perhaps this will be the one to stick.
