With their new self-titled record on Lookout!, Engine Down seem poised to join Pretty Girls Make Graves, Sparta, and Taking Back Sunday in the mainstream niche occupied by bands who've planed away the rougher edges of screamo (or "post-hardcore," if you like) and conflated edgy indie deportment with radio-ready pop dynamics, catchy adrenaline-soaked melodies, and a healthy dose of youth culture lifestyle branding (you know-- cute boys, great hair, sensitive yet hard, punk rock as corporate-backed package tour and soundtrack for extreme sports). Often, these kinds of traits pose problems for rock critics, but I'm not going to sling a dour screed that calls for a return to fatuous indie ethics. This is a diagnosis, not a lament.
In terms of creative trajectory, Engine Down have traversed a remarkably tidy arc, with a foreseeable terminus toward which they're decidedly aimed (it will be marked by full-on major label support and promotion, MTV rotation, and frequent soundtrack placement). The progression has been accomplished with precisely measured gestures of smoothing and softening. To wit:
Engine Down's debut LP for Lovitt Records, Under the Pretense of Present Tense, was prototypical, screamy post-hardcore (to a tee-- the superficially abstruse yet intrinsically meaningless syntax of its title is characteristic of the micro-genre). It was an exercise in stark opposites and crisp corners, with its pronounced loud/soft instrumental binary and Keely Davis' whisper-to-a-scream vocals. While pretty standard stuff, and no more worthy of mainstream attention than spiritual brethren like Four Hundred Years, its sharp melodic sense and inchoate cello arrangements augured evolutions to come.
It required two records for Engine Down to bridge the gap between the indie-screamo of Under the Pretense and the radio-hardcore of this new album; they were the roughly coequal Lovitt releases To Bury Within the Sound and Demure. Both of these albums were solid, if slightly strange due to their transitional state, as Engine Down got busy with the chisel and began hewing the sharp corners from their sound. Davis' reedy (yet bell-clear and resonant) vocals rubbed rather oddly against the still lo-fi (if more ambitious, thanks to J. Robbins) production-- the songs weren't quite the easy-to-swallow capsules they would become, but neither were they the quadrangular slabs of the band's debut, and the amorphous shapes were difficult to quantify. The albums retained post-hardcore trappings, but were more melodic, moodier, poppier, screamless, slower, subtler in terms of volume and tempo shifts, and anchored more centrally around the piano and string arrangements. While these records were not of the same caliber as this, their self-titled Lookout! debut, their ambition made it easy for anyone with a little intuition to see a departure like this mounting on the horizon.
And so we arrive at Engine Down, wherein the quantum leap the band was clearly straining toward on their previous two records is somewhat achieved. Via a confluence of experience, ambition and glossy production, Engine Down have arrived at a palatable music that, with a little more refinement and promotional support, could cement their place in the mainstream cultural canon. Indeed, the production is going to be the deal-breaker for Engine Down fans, and if you're usually biased against vaguely hardcore bands who put extra coats of lacquer on music that you feel should be raw and untamed, I'd suggest dropping the rating above by a full point. By the same token, if you feel music is well-served by a high production value and view recording techniques as an integral component (Flaming Lips and late Modest Mouse fans, here's looking at you), you may do well to boost the rating into the low eights.
Because on this record (for which they've left Lovitt for the somewhat larger Lookout!, which one assumes to be a stepping stone toward Interscope or Epic), Engine Down have employed producer Brian McTernan (Thrice, Hot Water Music, et al.) to achieve starker sound separation, richer tones, and their most dark and rumbling atmospheres to date. The upgrade is most apparent in Davis' vocals, which no longer cut through the arrangements like a dorsal fin, but nestle deeply into their terrain-- instead of being nasal and keening, they're lower, more variegated and shaded, and seem summoned from the diaphragm rather than torn from the lungs.
The band is easily recognizable-- Cornbread Compton's primal and syncopated percussion, Davis' vocal theatrics, Jason Wood's metronomic bass, and Jonathan Fuller's winnowing minor-key guitar dirges are all intact-- but recognizable in the way you recognize a childhood friend upon reconnecting with them in adulthood. Paradoxically, in perfecting a music that should resonate in teenaged breasts across the land, Engine Down have grown up.
All the earmarks of the new Engine Down are distilled in the opening track, "Rogue". It's leaner, more propulsive and snarling than anything they've heretofore produced. Davis' now-restrained vocals dart amid a swirl of feedback and unremitting, distorted bass, climbing a ladder of intensity toward the explosive chorus. The staccato bursts and lilting, plaintive vocals of "And Done" recall Sunny Day Real Estate's more expansive moments. "Cover" unfolds with relentless intensity as Davis glissades over meaty power chords and tricked-out guitar scribbles with an undeniable vocal authority. Such aggressive fare is juxtaposed by morose torch songs like "In Turn", which wafts an ominous arpeggio over swelling strings and Davis' gentle vocals, as the arrangement ramifies in a crescendo of mounting pageantry.
"Etcetera" is a haunting chamber-song of night sounds and smoldering piano-man emoting, which, of course, gradually builds into a spine-shivering guitar climax that puts the record to rest. Its tone is consummately elegiac and mournful. Given Engine Down's history and implicit future trajectory, it's hard not to perceive "Etcetera" as a literal elegy, instead of a figurative critical construct: a requiem for the band they were, which must be interred and memorialized before they can embrace the band they clearly want to become.
