Over the last five years, a group of Brooklyn musicians got together and recorded songs from a planned musical about a doomed interracial romance in a Pennsylvania coal mining town, drawing inspiration from an old folk song taught to children in Quaker schools in the 1950s. No, that’s not a summary of a special East Coast episode of “Portlandia”—this actually happened. Break Line the Musical is a song cycle written by Yeasayer vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder and pianist Maxwell Kardon, and work on the project began a decade ago when they were fiddling around with a guitar and a banjo on a front porch in Philadelphia. They spent the next five years sporadically working on the songs and began putting them to tape in 2008; around that time, details of the project emerged, including the potential involvement of a gospel choir and plans to bring the production to the stage. The latter hasn’t happened yet, and if the liner notes for this recording are to be believed, the former never happened at all; regardless, Wilder and Kardon’s sense of ambition is inherent.
Considering Wilder’s main gig, the mere existence of Break Line makes some sense. Yeasayer’s buzz-generating 2007 debut All Hour Cymbals leaned hard on proggy mysticism, while the melted pop structures of Odd Blood from 2010 and Fragrant World from 2012 exuded a try-anything-once sense of adventurousness. While Fragrant World was a dismaying, grayed mix of muddy electronics and moody vocals that smacked of a band getting lost in their own heads, the initially divisive Odd Blood has aged better, its high points an intriguing realization of the psychedelic-pop promise some of their peers once held. Even at their lowest, Yeasayer have never sounded “normal,” and it’s that relative weirdness that has, for the time being, drawn the curious towards the band and their associated projects.
In a recent interview with The T Magazine, Wilder claims the pair looked to Celine Dion and music from the ‘70s for creative inspiration for this project. But despite those claims and his own pedigree as a moderately odd songwriter, the most surprising thing about Break Line is how ordinary the project sounds. These 11 songs are almost disarmingly straightforward and simplistic, adhering to the platitudes and rigid structures of a high school musical. From the harmonica that kicks off “Coal Into Diamonds”, featuring vocals from Aku Orraca-Tetteh of synth-proggers Dragons of Zynth, it’s apparent that Wilder and Kardon weren’t interested in taking risks. But even after discarding any expectations brought to the table while approaching the project, Break Line is as an exceptionally dull collection of songs, with flickers of hammy theatricality weighed down by leaden arrangements that sound boring even by the standards set by modern self-important faux-indie music.
Heard as an album, the mid-tempo bombast and insufferable balladry of Break Line coalesces into flavorless mush, so maybe it’s better to approach it as a musical with a cohesive narrative. But it's no better on that level. Beyond the details already provided in the lead-up to the album’s release, few lyrics suggest a narrative—Suckers’ Quinn Walker plaintively singing about blowing up coal mines over the folksy shuffle of “They’re Stealing Our Coal”, the ruminations on strikebreaking and lynching uttered by that same band’s Austin Fisher over the colorless plod of “Better to Die”. But even with a lyric sheet on hand, it’s impossible to understand what, exactly, Break Line is about.
Whatever sense of story exists comes from the rotating cast of vocalists: In addition to Walker, Fisher, Kardon, and Wilder, there’s Yeasayer co-lead singer Chris Keating, Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanglij, Dirty Projectors’ Haley Dekle, and Man Man’s Honus Honus, among others. (MGMT's James Richardson and Delicate Steve contribute instrumentally, but you can’t hear either in the music’s beige Americana.) With the exception of Wilder, who is painfully awkward on “Wedding Day”, none of these vocalists embarrass themselves. Honus Honus, in particular, has never sounded more at home than he does barking about “bombs in the mineshaft” over the coffee-shop blues of “It Doesn’t Seem Right”, a pairing so hilariously on-the-nose it scans as unintentional comedy.
The most notable contributors to Break Line are Yeasayer themselves. Three-quarters of the band’s current lineup pitches in, along with former member Jason Trammell. And while it’d be unfair to think of this record as the proper follow-up to Fragrant World, Wilder’s recent claims that the band will be taking a more organic approach to their next album is, in the face of this collection’s plain-faced blahs, disheartening. For now, though, Break Line is a musical without an audience, and its creators might be better off if it fails to find one.
