Ben Schneider's a man out of time, all rust-colored and sepia-toned, prone to dressing like an extra from Cold Mountain. The Lord Huron frontman sings of river crossings, trudging through forests, shouting out his love from the mountaintops, all these big, romantic, pre-cell-phone notion of fidelity, honor, the lay of the land. After a couple of well-received EPs-- including 2010's fine Mighty-- the Michigan-to-L.A. transplant's debut LP, Lonesome Dreams, finds Schneider digging his mud-caked heels into his music's more rustic side, shedding much of the electronic flourishes and international flavors of his early EPs and going to town on harmony-rich folk-rock. But by throwing the focus onto the latter half of his Urban Cowboy routine, Schneider's vision has narrowed, his once-vibrant, open-armed Americana now overcautious, content to shoot squarely for the middle.
Mighty found Schneider couching his amber-tinted, My Morning Jacket-indebted wallops with clattering rhythms and meandering arrangements, lending the music both a dynamism and a dreamlike quality well-suited to his chronologically unfixed lyrics. Sonically, Lonesome Dreams is crisper, less woozy, likely a product of Schneider's time with Lord Huron's five-piece traveling ensemble. He's still drawing deep from the well of what's come to represent "American music" in 2012: mostly acoustic instruments, pile'o'choirboys harmonies, lyrics about long distances and time-spanning loves, that sort of thing. But, where Mighty saw Schneider playing with the edges of the form, Lonesome Dreams sticks with the tried-and-true. All this makes for a mean case of deja vu. Not only is Schneider's wanderer's spirit harder and harder to locate amidst the 100-part vocals and galloping melodies, he seems to be retreating into his influences here, with Lonesome Dreams traveling the same dusty trails as the current princes of the provincial, Fleet Foxes.
Two things here. Upon arrival, Fleet Foxes, too, were met with a lot of "CSNY + MMJ = :S"-style hangwringing; reductive, sure, if not entirely unwarranted. And in his review of their Mighty EP, our Ian Cohen noted the influence of both My Morning Jacket's grain-silo harmonies and Animal Collective's bleary drift on the material while adding that this kind of influence-sleuthing alone doesn't often make for the most helpful criticism. And, you know, I tend to agree. But, man, this Fleet Foxes thing isn't just close, it's uncanny, both sonically and structurally, and it's a hard thing to see around. There was more than a whiff of Fleet Foxes in the choral pile-ons of Mighty, though that was cut through with that record's trickier rhythms and unfixed edges. Ten seconds into opener "Ends of the Earth", you've already got a rustly Pecknoldian strum and a pile of flyaway harmonies; a minute in, the song pivots, exploding into a towering vocal line that'd catch even the most dyed-in-the-wool Foxes fan wondering if they missed a demo. That chiming hollowbody guitar tone, all those 10-part campire kumbayas, verses quickly followed by a mirror-image instrumental? The gang's all here. Fleet Foxes didn't forge their sound out of wholly original material, it's true, but like any good band, they rearrange and reconstitute their sources in manner that's become unmistakably theirs. You know a Fleet Foxes song when you hear one. Unless, of course, you're listening to Lord Huron.
Lonesome Dreams' instant knock of familiarity will prove comforting for some, but it gives these tracks something of a plug-and-play feel. Many songs are dramatically assembled, and all of them move, but when they move in pretty much the same ways as another, spryer band, it's that much harder to get caught up in their attendant drama. It doesn't help Schneider, head often planted in a very different decade, seems to be having some trouble saying much about the present through the lens of the past, so ends up not really saying much of anything at all. His love is the timeless kind, but he's so scant with details, so quick with platitudes, that it congeals into this sweet but somewhat blank mishmash of horses with no names and walking 500 miles and just-passing-through-ma'ams. But beyond a few well-worn turns-of-phrase and all that pining, there's not much meat there. Even the best of the bunch, "Time to Run", never quite gets to why exactly Schneider finds himself on the move, and skimping on details is never a good look where historical fiction is concerned.
Schneider remains a gifted (if less daring) arranger, able to steadily build steam throughout a track, knowing where to stick choruses for the maximum payoff without bludgeoning you with them, Mumfords-style: These songs are sturdy, and what marks they set for themselves, they hit. But Mighty managed all that, too, while folding in alluring pockets of psychedelia and offering up a little more to go on lyrically on than Lonesome Dreams' tepid Larry McMurtryisms. Schneider's certainly not alone in thinking harmony-heavy vocals, bustling strums, and a couple-three "brother of mines" is enough to conjure up some romanticized notion of the past. But it's all so carefully composed, so studiously old-timey, this once-vibrant vision of American music overlaid with the drab browns and coppers of a Six Flags souvenir photobooth.
