Organs and synths percolate beneath the songs on City Fallen Leaves, Comet Gain's fifth album of wistful jangle pop, but never as assertively as on "White Radiance of Eternity", a frittering seven-minute fuzzball from the band's recent "Beautiful Despair" 12". The song tapped the same vein as the Clientele's "Losing Haringey"-- rain-slicked spoken monologue over a mid-tempo vamp-- only for longer and with less concrete details, more coruscating electronic drones. Some will find City Fallen Leaves' tighter, strums-and-drums approach more appealing, but it makes a poor backdrop to David Christian's puffed-up musings on mixtapes and the arcana of London post-grad life.
Christian does quarter-life crisis with an admirable lack of direction. His bandmates often seem lost, too, but don't blame them: Comet Gain have shuffled through countless incarnations, Christian the only remaining alphamember. Picking up the thread, Christian and co. muster plenty of existential bluster, the keystone of the 13-year-old band-cum-franchise. Unfortunately, Wedding Present beat them to the hankie, while compatriots Belle & Sebastian and Clinic dropped the moleskine confessionals for American viability.
Mixtapes qua declarations of love-- fodder for "The Ballad of a Mix Tape" and others-- are dull but acceptable; I'd rather read Richardson. The best iterations of Christian's high-romance doggerel dance a simple beat. "The Fist's in the Pocket" is hard to love, impossible to hate; the chorus-- two chummy voices chiming charmingly offbeat-- comes fast, easy, predictable. "Days I Forgot to Write Down" scampers a six with the breeze of four, plus it brings the spectral synths that made "White Radiance of Eternity" so darn sublime.
In a way they got lucky with that one, though: Narrating over vamp, even at its best, is all smoke and mirrors. The trick is getting the hoi polloi to follow. Doors did it with narcotics on "The End", Velvets with putrid distortion on "Heroin". "The Punk Got Fucked"'s aimlessness embodies its lost protagonist's dilemma ("Should I stay and fight or go out tonight or just turn out the lights?") too literally, letting organ and fuzz-box'd guitar wander unleashed with only a caveman bassline to anchor. Ironic, then, when the album's backside fails with earnestness, not blas. Song after song puffs an ambered nostalgia, each one turning the same six-string pinwheels. The problem with nostalgia, see, is the slip from poignance into anticlimax happens quickly. So when closer "Nameless" clears the air with dynamics and a backbeat (note the chant, "something is missing," maybe meta), it's too late for an album confused by its own ruminations.
