On last year's debut Our Way Is Revenge, Brooklyn's Shock Cinema sought cheap thrills from haunted house scare tactics and literary snobbery. To make matters more irritating, their already dubious shtick was steeped in cookie-cutter post-punk posturing. The album stared down its nose at your while flaunting the most garden variety craftsmanship, the kind of Siouxsie Sioux-inspired goth rock available on every Williamsburg corner. In retrospect, it's clear that Shock Cinema, slapped together from spare parts of several bands, jumped the gun a bit by releasing an awkward EP consisting of a few so-so songs and two remixes. Hell And Highwater jettisons many of the band's gimmicks and showcases a formidable range of songwriting styles and moods, and you don't have to be into something like French surrealist film to appreciate the music.
Chalk up some of the improvements to a change of scenery. Recorded in San Francisco with Nation of Ulysses/Fucking Champs member Tim Green, the album kicks off with the gloomy Yeah Yeah Yeahs'-inspired rocker "Leviathan" but quickly scatters in several directions. Lead singer Destiny Montague isn't digitally processed to sound like she's singing from the depths of hell on every track, and the newfound starkness in her vocals makes a jangly dirge like "Oddfellow" sound less like Joy Division or Bauhaus than I.R.S.-era R.E.M. trying their hand at avant-garde. "Mutineers Reconsider" makes for a nice point of comparison with Revenge's hokey "Art of Noir", the former handling its precarious dance-punk feel with a lot more discretion and more memorable melody.
That's not to say Shock Cinema's mastered the art of subtlety. "Atlas Shrugged" is as long-winded and overbearing as the eponymous novel, and tracks like "Lone Islands" and "Dead Sea" are slow burners that build not with musical ideas but additional layers of instruments and cheesy dramatic splashes. Still, Hell's songs stand on their own much better than previous material, so much so that a bluesy stomper like "Wax Wings" doesn't even sound related to the other YYY/Kills-like numbers here. The uniform pallor that sanded Revenge down into one constant, anti-climactic sneer doesn't afflict Shock Cinema's latest effort, and even if they're still struggling to carve their own niche in post-punk-- or at least find an exciting single-- they're much closer to doing so than they were 12 months ago.
