Last year, Chicago's Catfish Haven made a fine official debut with their Please Come Back EP. Pumping the energy of their punk rock youths into velvety white-boy soul and acoustic roots-rock, and with a raucous rhythm section chugging away beneath George Hunter's mellifluous howl, they managed to skirt snooty trad and revisionist indie pretensions alike by doing something obvious: charging passionately through emphatic melodies with strictly defined instrumentation. It's a simple formula they retain for their debut LP, Tell Me, which suffers from periods of drag that were absent from the tightly coiled Please Come Back.
There's another terrific EP on Tell Me, and you could put together a top-slot Catfish Haven record with both discs and a little iTunes pruning. The bright, perky strum of "I Don't Worry" is just the kind of haystack-rostrum from which Hunter is meant to proselytize, climaxing in what I'm afraid I have to characterize as a bona-fide hootenanny. The swamp-gospel shimmy of the title track is infectious, and the taut, cheerful funk of "Crazy for Leaving" is good slinky fun. The flayed soul of Hunter's vocals on "All I Need is You" resonates well with the song's spindly, sprightly lilt, while "Let it Go (Got to Grow)" profits from the same frantic yet controlled strumming found on last year's EP's stand-out title track.
Nevertheless, on Tell Me, Catfish Haven presents as a good band working in a format-- in this case, the long-player-- that just doesn't suit their music, at least not if it stays as circumscribed as it is now. It's built from such sparse materials-- hard-charging acoustic guitars, clattering rhythms, raspy soul vocals, and, as of this record, judicious keys and horns-- and mines such a narrow strip of musical terrain that its interest has the potential to run out before the wax does. Hunter's lyrics don't assuage this intermittent sense of monotony. The same directness that works in the short format falters in the long one; the alternately broken-hearted and platitudinous catch phrases becoming less charming and more tiresome. Nor does it help that the album is rounded out by a handful of slow burners so thin they make a scanty impression. "Down by Your Fire" and "Grey Skies" meander like they've got nowhere to go, which, it seems, they don't. Hunter and co. have plenty of talent, but unless they significantly diversify their sound, they're going to be better known for the concise, exuberant rush than the sustained concept.
