Calm down, you haven't accidentally time-warped to 1998, and no, this isn't Michael Ian Black giving you another dose of "I Love the 90s". After a five-year hiatus and even more time languishing in obscurity, Seattle quartet Harvey Danger have returned, not too sick but not too well. One-hit wonderdom does funny things to a band, as evident when Harvey Danger's street cred was forever damned upon that first sardonic verse "I had visions, I was in them, I was lookin' into the mirror." Ya see, these brainy college cutups, with their cheeky puns and witticisms, were simply too smart for their own good, and against their will, "Flagpole Sitta" catapulted them infinitely higher than expected on the cultural totem-pole, almost to the point of absurdity.
The interesting thing about the band's first two albums was how they tip-toed around the 90s monoliths while sampling their shticks at the same time; noisy but not Nirvana, geeky but not Weezer, quirky but not Pavement, raging but not against machines. In other words, throw your 10 fave 90s indie albums in a blender and poof!-- Harvey Danger. Unfortunately, Little by Little wobbles without these coeval moors (Weezer's dead to me), leaving us with delightful vestiges though ultimately sounding like a Ben Folds album.
I guess it's in some holy scripture that indie artists gotta go soft by age 35, but Little by Little's lack of fuzzy axes is heresy. Pop-punk gem "Cream and Bastards Rise" throws us a smart-ass bone, but the band leans a bit too heavily on tickling the ivories. All "Eleanor Rigby" staccato and self-pity, cathartic opener "Wine, Women and Song" makes the most sense of the sedated bunch as singer Sean Nelson apparently comments on his 15 minutes of fame: "Wine, women and song/ I've tried them all it did not take me long/ To figure I'd unlocked the door to happiness/ I figured wrong with a capital 'R'."
Problem is, Nelson's wrenches his gut to the point of emo, ceasing the whole peanut gallery sniping that's separated these guys from, say, Primitive Radio Gods. "Little Round Mirrors" and "Diminishing Returns" lay on the sap and sweeping choruses, building to anti-climactic lines like "You love all your little round mirrors/ See yourself reflected in one/ There's a hole in the middle you can't seem to fill". When I heard the Danger was back, I prayed for a great anachronistic, Rip Van Winkle-like record adding yet another wrinkle to the band's outre act. Instead, Little by Little (save two or three tracks) reads like a carbon dating test, displaying the band's decaying sound gradually assimilating with its exhausted surroundings.
