Until recently, Matthew Mondanile seemed to regard Ducktails as the lackadaisical counterpart to his other, better known band, Real Estate. The first two Ducktails LPs were cozy, blithely executed indie rock comfort food that occasionally coalesced into semi-structured songs. With 2011's Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics, Mondanile tightened up and offered a tuneful (but still slight) precursor to the sublime guitar pop of Real Estate's Days. The Flower Lane is the latest progression for what now resembles a fully fledged group. Mondanile's hasn't tempered the echoes of his other band in Ducktails, but he isn't confined to Real Estate's shadow, either.
The presence of New Jersey power-poppers and Real Estate tourmates Big Troubles helps to give the record a wider musical vocabulary than Mondanile's previous (and mostly solo) Ducktails efforts. After the Days-like cathedral of luminously chiming guitars that heralds the opening track "Ivy Covered House," Mondanile settles into a warmly melancholy vein of jazzy, fractured pop songs. At times, it's as if he's paying homage to Kaputt and that record's gauche elegance: The soft-rock keyboard accents and head-swimming horns of "Under Cover" represent a level of musical sophistication that Mondanile hasn't attempted before on a Ducktails record. The title tracks cuts the blurry, VHS tape-quality of past Ducktails efforts with a rainy day Steely Dan electric piano lick that clarifies and underlines the song's gently serrated hook. The lysergic pop of "Timothy Shy" culminates with a fiery guitar solo that burns through Mondanile's normally narcotized façade. Taken together, these subtle yet unmistakable upgrades to Ducktails' gauzy instrumentation immediately command attention, where the records before The Flower Lane were content to lay indifferently outside of it.
Some of the best moments on The Flower Lane occur when Mondanile steps aside and plays musical director for his cast of guest stars. He's especially deft at utilizing female voices, which offer a colorful contrast to his flat, expressionless murmur. "Sedan Magic" stumbles over an erratic R&B rhythm on the Mondanile-sung verses, and then zooms to the stratosphere whenever Madeline Follin of Cults takes over on the grabby chorus. Mondanile hands the album's best track, the dreamy love song, "Letter of Intent", to Future Shuttle's Jessa Farkas and Big Troubles' Ian Drennan, and the result is a sexy, shy-eyed snuggle jam aided by Oneohtrix Point Never's Daniel Lopatin on synths and his Ford & Lopatin collaborator Joel Ford on bass.
The relatively sumptuous presentation of The Flower Lane successfully separates it from the rest of Ducktails' discography. Unfortunately, a familiar emptiness remains. With Days, Real Estate mined a potent strain of nostalgic ache, giving the songs an emotional thoroughfare that tied the record together into a unified statement. The Flower Lane approaches the musical eloquence of Days, but Mondanile's mind and his soul still don't seem to be in the same place.
Get past the beauty of these songs and what's left is a frustrating lack of substantive sentiment: The gurgly funk of "Assistant Director" and the glistening, electro-folk ballad "Academy Avenue" speak to Mondanile's ability to churn out easily chewable ear candy. But nothing here lingers, and after a while Mondanile's attachment to the pleasantly ephemeral starts to feel like a dodge. The only lyric that sticks, tellingly, comes from of a cover of Peter Gutteridge's "Planet Phrom": "I'm moving in a haze all day and I've got a cloudy mind." Mondanile has cleared his mind on The Flower Lane; now he just needs to open his heart.
