Are We There Yet?, the debut from New York's The Citizens, is an album-lover's album. Well-paced and cleverly sequenced, it is, in many ways, a throwback to the great records of the 1970s, and fresh enough not to sound like one. Y'see, the album is a tough thing to perfect, and few bands really ever develop the consistency and variety necessary to flesh one out properly-- to make a record you'll want to hear in its entirety-- which makes the fact that this is The Citizens' first shot all the more impressive.
Opener "What's Happening at the Seams" puts the band's best foot forward. It's a dramatic melody swelling in fields of reverb, the band doing their best to create an Eno/Lanois sense of largeness around the song's tightly rhythmic arrangement. The track also lays out several of the band's general strengths, from their keen sense of dynamic tension to keyboardist/vocalist Mark Lesseraux's high, soulful tenor. It's followed by one of the album's several rambunctious pop tunes. "Blusher", with its oohing backup vocals, melodic bassline and insanely catchy hooks wrapped around oddball lines like, "Sally got smacked with a blue knapsack/ Just before she passed out from blood loss and boredom," is an avalanche of melody, the best of the songs that follow the band's power-pop muse.
The other uptempo songs run the gamut from raw, brash rock 'n' roll like "Catch You on the Way Down" to twisted, vulcanized boogie like "In B for Backward", which shifts meters and grooves with near-Dadaist abandon, as if John Bollinger's drums were a raucous blast from the 1920s. However, the meat of the album isn't comprised of those songs. Instead, it's built on a backbone of sweeping ballads, a strategy that sinks a lot of albums. Fortunately, The Citizens largely avoid the pitfalls, mostly because Lesseraux can sing his ass off and isn't afraid to do it. For evidence, look no further than the keening chorus of "Kaleidoscope (Do You Recall?)", on which he brings the high honey as the band constructs a desert expanse around him.
The Citizens have some obvious jazz and cabaret references, and most of their other ballads play to them in one way or another. "Deck Full of Jokers" is listless and heaving, sounding like the band has kept on playing well into the night after the doors have closed and the audience has gone home with stray snare hits falling arrhythmically, guitars squeezing out ugly notes as violins play mock fanfares in the deep background. Lesseraux trades verses with guest Felicity Fenton on "You Might Be Right", with the two sharing a haunting melody over creaky acoustic guitars.
But then, Are We There Yet? does have a few problems-- "Clementine" just doesn't kick into gear quickly enough, the spoken vocals on "Mussolini's First Crush" are a bit awkward, and of course, there's that regrettable cover photo (love the hats, though). On the whole, though, this is an extremely solid debut by a band with all of its pieces very well in place. If they can stick it out, it's easy to imagine them achieving great things.
