Next on the slate of recent releases is This Harness Can’t Ride Anything from Chin Up Chin Up. I posted about their previous album We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers back in May. That record was one of my favorites of 2004, so I had high hopes for this one.
Sad to say, those hopes have not been completely fulfilled. This record manages to avoid developing their sound in any significant way while at the same time (and this is the real killer) failing to achieve the consistent understated beauty that characterized Skyscrapers.
Which is not to say this is a bad record. It’s still better than pretty much anything else out there, and has a number of songs to get you bipping and bopping. And once again, they have demonstrated their talent at layering sounds to produce songs that sound both thick and airy at the same time.
The main differences are that the vocals take a much more prominent role this time around, and it’s a little more rock and roll. This is both good and bad. There’s something quite appealing about the vocals struggling to emerging out of the cascading waves of sound. Still, that can get old after a while, and there’s nothing wrong with giving Bolen a chance to take the center stage for a while. Similarly, the rock element makes for a less pretty album, but it gives it some oomph, which was arguably the one thing missing from Skyscrapers.
In its best moments (the title track, “Water Planes in Snow,” “Landlocked Lifeguards,” and “Stolen Mountains,” to name a few), this could easily be the new, a bit more mellow, Cure-influenced Arcade Fire record. Which is more than 99.9% of bands could hope for. But this band is good enough to be more, so here’s hoping that Harness is a staging ground for some really interesting records to come.
MP3s:
This Harness Can’t Ride Anything (from their website)Water Planes in Snow
They’re on tour, and are hitting most of the country, including a show at my alma mater Whitman College (in beautiful Walla Walla, Washington) next week. Check em out.