Now THIS is something!

Yeah. I like my music on the melancholy side. So sue me. So much of the genre is so unbelievably BAD that I get overly excited when I hear stuff like this. Would this be a cool concert to go see? Only if you're in the mood. This isn't music you'll be tapping your toes to. It's music to listen to wind blow by. Is it gonna get airplay? Only on my dream radio station, the one in my head, when we're on the air only when it rains and at night and I take callers after midnight who talk with me about love, longing, and loss. Then I play The Swans and Trance to the Sun and Cold for them and I reinforce the idea that it's okay to mourn the death of something you'll never know. That it's okay to take everyone else's grief, too, and turn it into something you can use. Something you can build with.

This reminds me of a band you've probably never heard of (but SHOULD have, dammit) called The Durutti Column. The LC-era-like "Carousel" and the dark but touching "Bruise" (sample lyric: "Watching the sky, waiting the fall. Tearing the world, bearing it all. Watching the sun slide down the wall") are just breathtaking. I'm not so upset about the lack of discernible lyrics because, honestly, I think you'll get it anyway. It's understated, but it's clever, and it's wise in its conservation of noise energy into emotional energy. It's not an overwrought piece of work, and the music itself gets the emotion across just fine without the instrumental histrionics normally so germane to the music of melancholy.

Vocalist Reese Beeman really has it together, showing his colors as my newly crowned king of "less is more." Equally good is drummer Scott Sasser, who manages to look beyond his cymbals at all times and be as much a part of the melody as anything else. Beeman and Julian Capps take turns on the bass (hm...I'm thinking somewhere along the Simon Raymonde end of the spectrum) and make it sing. Capps, Beeman, and James Adkisson take the guitars and progress beyond one-string solos and folk-style quarterpicking in order to make this sound truly unique.

I have one hope - that the band expands a little and shows us their other side. I know there's a scream in there just itching to get out. Occasionally, this records feels a teeny bit one-dimensional, only in that the meters and tones remain largely constant. It doesn't affect my opinion negatively. I just wonder if they're not alienating a whole cadre of potential fans who may need to hear the flip side of despair from them. I'd like to hear their version of a different take on it.

Overall, this is absolutely lovely. I haven't heard anything in this genre that was this good in a Really Long Time. At least go give this a listen at the local record store when you have some free time. I can only imagine what their label is thinking. "This isn't gonna make us any money." Just wait until, like Shudder to Think (another amazing band that nobody's heard of), they start doing film soundtracks (check out STT's work for last year's "High Art" for a real treat). They'll be unstoppable then, and not just invincible.