The opening guitar’s jaunty dissonance gets me thinking I’ve heard this before, but the mid-song scattered howls in “A New Parade” reassure me that I’m mistaken… for now. “Loosen Up” stacks some lazy blues licks and an ethereal, slightly off pitch slow strum atop galloping percussion, all which leads dead into Delff’s shredded scream as the song’s finale (who needs a cadence?). “Air Better Come” is loaded with head bobbing beats, albeit head bobbing beats that Radiohead patented years ago (if you’re gonna copy someone though, Phil Selway isn’t too bad a choice). As the album progresses, I wonder if The Shaky Hands toured with Wolf Parade during the Apologies… era. Musically, the first half of Lunglight wants you to believe something, almost baiting you to connect with an ornately prescribed sound, but the album begins evolving and by the end your upside down and starting it all over to figure out why.
Lyrically, Delff teeters back and forth between optimism (“I could just wake up / I’ve had enough / All we do is yell / Yell too much / I believe when we fall, we come back up” from “Wake the Breathing Light”) and cynicism (“See it coming / In his eyes / You better stay / Where you can hide” from “World’s Gone Mad”), seemingly obsessed with some sort of resolve in Lunglight’s deeper issues. Delff mumbles and barks throughout the album, reminiscent of that rugged voice of Caleb Followill from the Aha Shake Heartbreak days. Effortless lines like “I’ve had it good / I’ve had it bad” from “Wake the Breathing Light” are simple, almost trite, but just work - exemplifying the graspable nature of Lunglight.
Lunglight showcases a lot of what we’ve already heard before, but that in and of itself is nothing too shabby. It’s done well, but been done nonetheless. Dan Boeckner of Wolf Parade is quoted as saying “after Apologies to the Queen Mary we wrote about four or five new songs but we decided to throw them out because they sounded too much like what we’d already done.” Lunglight is a worthwhile little thirteen track project with gems like “Loosen Up”, “Love All Of” and “Wake the Breathing Light” which justify all, if any, deserved stars, points, and or Noodle records, but I somehow feel those aforementioned four or five songs might have ended up in some Shaky Hands.
We Don't Give 'Em A Rating... You Do
You need to be a registered & logged in to rate.
0 total votes | Average: 0 out of 10
Tags: The Shaky Hands
Category(s): Reviews
Feel free to leave a response, or trackback from your site.
