If Jesse Elliott were making music in Southern California, we'd surely be comparing him to Gram Parsons. If he were from below the Mason-Dixon, we'd dub him southern rock and compare him (favorably, of course) to Kings of Leon. But Elliott is a Midwesterner living in Washington, D.C., a city whose chief musical styles (hardcore and go-go, for instance) are so far off from his sound that even the most imaginative listener would find no connections. Which is actually surprising, since he approaches indie rock as a massive synthesizing endeavor, combining many styles and sounds in a way that makes his stage name-- These United States-- pretty much inevitable.
Within mere months, Elliott has released not one but two full-length albums. The first, A Picture of the Three of Us at the Gate to the Garden of Eden, is a collaboration with David Strackany (aka Paleo) that sounds a bit like the Postal Service and a bit like Beck's blues-folk albums from the 90s. The follow-up, Crimes, puts Elliott in front of a full band and was recorded in less than a week in Lexington, Kentucky. Picture is the primaries, Crimes the general election, but as different as they are from one another, neither sounds like an entirely satisfying expression of Elliott's talent or vision.
Picture, the more ambitious of the pair, simply sounds unfocused, overly concerned with effects and production-- with moments and sounds-- than with songs or overall shape. Creaking boards and soft keys set the pensive tone on opener "Preface: Painless", then "First Sight" mixes guitar with Strackany's electronic burbles and Elliott's exaggeratedly poetic lyrics: "The cataracts-ed alley cat spat back at the moon, thrown out into the nighttime/ Nine lifetimes too soon." I could quote similarly unfathomable and overwritten passages from just about every song, which would be okay if they were bolstered by memorable hooks. The best, on "The Business", sounds like it was cribbed from "Summertime Blues". On this debut, Elliott either has something to say or a clever way to say something, but rarely both at the same time.
As its succinct title suggests, Crimes is a much more focused and slightly more rousing effort. There are actually fewer musicians on this album than on the debut, but it feels like they had greater input on its direction, effectively streamlining Elliott's verbosity and punching up his songs considerably. With a finely grained voice that often brings to mind M. Ward, the singer/songwriter sounds much more at home and much more purposeful in these surroundings, especially on the slow-burning "We Go Down to That Corner" and "Study the Moon".
However, much like Josh Ritter, Elliott gets carried away with his grand vision of America, packing his songs with look-at-me allusions to Mark Twain, Cain and Abel, Dionysius, and Babe the Blue Ox (the blue ox, not the band). But his pretensions are much more palatable in a rock setting than in a bedroom pop context, and a few songs-- such as "Honor Amongst Thieves", with its raindrops of Tom Hnatow's pedal steel-- have actual hooks to offset Elliott's self-indulgence. Crimes still feels a bit scattered, as if both records are practice sessions for albums three and four. Their eclecticism may stem from a precocious artist who wants to keep his options as open as possible, but it sounds more like someone who either equates artistic seriousness with a form of ADHD or can't commit to being himself. Hopefully Elliott will form these disparate elements into a more perfect union soon enough.
