A lot of things frustrate me about White Rabbits' third album, Milk Famous. First and foremost, the band's mistaking melodic and emotional obtuseness with alluring restraint. So I apologize for erring on the side of artless candor to express the single most obvious thing about them: They sound like Spoon. A lot like Spoon*.* Now, here's the major difference between White Rabbits and the hundreds of other bands of whom that's also true: They actually have Spoon's permission. Serving as producer on 2009's It's Frightening, Britt Daniel helped the Brooklyn-via-Columbia, Mo., sextet advance past the peppy dancehall-rock of Fort Nightly to become a streamlined and moody band that might find their prior enthusiasm somewhat embarrassing. And now on Milk Famous, they enlist Mike McCarthy (Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Gimme Fiction) to produce, but rather than hearing a band use enviable mentoring to discover their own identity, there's something unnerving about how supplicant they are to this weird symbiotic relationship: White Rabbits get a crucial cosign, and Spoon ostensibly get a place to test drive studio tricks without worrying that their protégées will beat them at their own game.
Sounding like Spoon is hardly a non-starter, and in fact, a lot of bands could still stand to learn a lot from them. But Milk Famous falters by creating an Uncanny Valley effect by adopting the most easily replicable aspects without maintaining any sort of human element or offering anything that's identifiable as their own. Lead single "Heavy Metal" is perhaps their most blatant attempt yet to lionize their benefactors' sound sculpture over their songwriting, as it exchanges the verve and insistent rhythms of previous openers "Kid on My Shoulders" and "Percussion Gun" (their two finest songs) for a sonic game of Concentration!: To where can you match those backmasked synths, starchy basslines, eerily dead drums and edge-of-falsetto vocals? Are they from "Eddie's Ragga"? "Paper Tiger"? "Was It You"? All three? Either way, without a single melodic idea of substance, it's all trimmings, a Thanksgiving dinner of stuffing and cranberry sauce.
Which isn't to say White Rabbits have nothing at their disposal to distinguish themselves-- it's just they all get downplayed despite not being adverse to their new sonic goals in any way. It always bums me out to see a dual-percussionist setup underutilized, and while they give the drummers some shine with the showy polyrhythms of "Everyone Can't Be Confused" and "Back For More", they're mostly relegated to fill-free timekeeping and muffled funk. Likewise, Stephen Patterson has proven capable of leading ear-bending harmonies, which have been almost abandoned completely in favor of terse, disjointed phrases. Maybe it's all meant to reflect the communicative failures of brooding masculine figures, but it mostly ends up contributing to them as Milk Famous' lyrics sheet piles up clarifications, addendums, and corrections borne by self-reflexive cleverness ("It's nothing personal/ It's just that I'm not me”) and Yorke-ian magnetic poetry ("Don't tell me that it's all been sold/ The kitchen's on fire/ But you are self alone") to sidestep what Patterson might actually mean.
I can't help but acknowledge that Milk Famous sounds great because it really is all carefully protracted sound, confirming that "highly produced" isn't necessarily synonymous with "overproduced." If you set out listening to Milk Famous simply for its use of stereo spacing and post-production treatment, it's as satisfying a record as you'll hear in 2012, every normally acoustic instrument triggering so many extraneous textures, you'd think they secretly longed to be Disco Inferno. There's an intriguing tension at the outset of "Danny Come Inside", a stretched-thin vocal harmony sitting low against a hotly-mixed drum track, blunt riffs, and a sneaky hook, but all these interesting ideas just hang on, as the song itself is a four-minute jog to nowhere in particular. Likewise, all those neural bursts of guitar and patched-in drum flutters are perhaps intended as counterbalances to the austere lyricism and almost ambient use of melody, but it's a completely lopsided see-saw.
In White Rabbits' defense, otherwise potentially solid MOR bands treating choruses and song structure as vestigial organs of less-evolved times is seemingly as reflective of indie rock in general as it is their own personal path. But ultimately, this is a band overestimating its ability to be interesting instead of likeable, misjudging the chasm between its ambitions and its talents. Or, yeah, they pretty much want to be Spoon too, but you'd think they'd remember who warned listeners to "get free from the middleman."
