Heartache With Hard Work

The ‘momentum’ narrative is in full-force these days, despite evidence to the contrary.  To wit: another post from John Dickerson at Slate (who I actually really like as a reporter – despite taking him to task twice in one week) with an article about Romney ‘peaking at just the right moment.’

The evidence for this momentum? Big crowds cheering, which is…not much to go on to say the least.  Also, Meatloaf has endorsed Romney.  Hmmm.

The framing device here is that “everyone is flying blind about Ohio” and “both campaigns believe the polls are essentially tied.”

But we’re NOT flying blind about Ohio. There are a massive number of polls there, which confirm an enduring and meaningful Obama margin. If both campaigns are calling it tied, in spite of the clear statistical evidence to the contrary, it seems like the real story is WHY they are each framing it that way.

The funny thing is, this article was pre-debunked by Nate Silver who earlier in the same day provided a pretty comprehensive takedown of the ‘momentum’ narrative.  And then, to pile on, Sam Wang (who remains my go-to for electoral predictions) provides a direct response to Dickerson here.  Based on the actual data, if you want to tell a story about momentum, then Romney has it only to the extent that he appears to be holding onto some of his gains and preventing slippage back toward the world of a 330-340 Electoral Vote blowout.

It’s not surprising that political reporters would like the narrative of momentum.  They’re trying to tell stories, not analyze data.  But this is precisely the sort of area that informed analysis could seriously improve reporting.  There are still plenty of stories to tell without relying on the crutch of momentum.

And, really, narratives like momentum actually kill the ability to tell good campaign stories.  The problem is that the reporting class is overwhelmingly inclined to think about politics from the perspective of marketing.  The race is defined by the image of the candidates.  From that perspective, gains in popularity really should snowball.  As something grows more popular, more people use it because they want to be in on the trend.

Of course there is some truth to that.  There are political bubbles just like there are bubbles for Tickle-Me Elmo or PBR or iPads or whatever consumer product is super trendy right now that I’m clueless about.  And there are certainly campaigns that looked close for a long time, where a small swing just kept growing and turned into a blowout.  But those are a lot more rare, and particularly for the sort of high-profile campaigns that happen for president over the last couple decades.

But it’s a big problem to reduce campaigns to only that ephemera.  Political issues are much more durable, much more important, and much more tightly held than opinions about random consumer goods.

As far as I can tell, there are two main ways that momentum can matter a lot. The first is in circumstances where you want to convince people that your idea/candidate/policy is reasonable.  So evidence that people are signing on is important.   The second is when you’re trying to gain the ‘inevitability’ crown.  The idea there is more to discourage the opposition with seeming evidence that you’re not only winning, but the trend-lines make resistance pointless.

This helps explain why momentum matters a lot more in primaries or early in campaigns.  When people are still sorting out their general feelings about a campaign, or are picking from one of many options, the bandwagon effect is far more likely to matter.

Here in California we have a wonderful thing called direct democracy.  And by wonderful, I mean catastrophic.  The California initiative process is a pretty clear demonstration that as bad as government can sometimes be at organizing itself, it’s not nearly so bad as what happens if the people get involved.

Anyways, there are 11 on the ballot this year.  Here is my run-through of how I’ll be voting.

30 – Tax hikes to pay for schools.  YES.  There are two competing propositions to deal with the educational shortfall.  This is the one supported by the vast majority of the Democratic establishment.  In a sane world, Gov. Brown and the legislature could have just passed it as a normal law.  But we live in California, which is not a sane world, so it has to go to the voters.  Speaking as someone who is a grad student in the UC system, this is pretty darn important to get done.

31 – Budget micromanagement. NO.  I’m not positive this is a bad idea.  But it’s precisely the sort of ridiculously specific policy stuff that has no business in the realm of initiatives.    In addition, it fails one of my key heuristic devices when judging propositions. The people who support it do so in a bunch of extreme mushy-mouthed language about ‘reform’ and ‘forward’ and ‘bipartisan’ and ‘transparent’ without any real details.  If I’m going to lock something into place, I want to be certain that it’s fixing a real problem and fixing it well.

32 – Restrictions on political contribution.  NO.  See my heuristic above, but times one million.  This is being sold as reform that ‘goes as far as the Constitution allows’ to limit campaign contributions.  Which is code for targeting unions.  Look, Citizens United is terrible. This initiative makes it a lot worse.

33 – Auto insurance reform.  NO.  Ugh. This one helps no one except for some auto companies.  And it’s ludicrous that it should be up for a statewide vote at all.

34 – End the death penalty.  Emphatic YES.  The death penalty is a travesty of justice.  The state has no business killing its own citizens, regardless of what they’ve done.  This initiative is, sadly, probably going to fail.  Despite the fact that, even on utilitarian terms, the death penalty is an abject failure.  It doesn’t deter, it costs millions, and it is really really really racist.  But people love their vengeance, so…

35 – Human trafficking.  NO.  See above.  This may be a good policy, but it is not something that needs to be taken care of at the initiative-level.  I worry about the vagueness of the regulations it would impose, and it would be a serious pain to fix any problems as they emerge if this thing is embedded as a proposition.

36 – Three strikes.  YES.  The three strikes law is terrible.  This wouldn’t get rid of it, but would at least require that the third offense has to be a serious crime.  It’s a tiny bit of a loaf, but it’s better than nothing.  This one is an easy call for me since my presumption is basically always to vote in favor of the rights of prisoners.  There are a massive number of social forces balanced against them and almost no one to advocate for them.  So any little thing that gets this far is almost certain to be better than the status quo.

37 – GMO labeling.  NO.  Ugh.  The outrage over GMOs is a pretty good example of what is wrong with our country.  All food is genetically modified.  Have you ever seen what corn looked like before it was cultivated?  Do you know that kale, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, and cabbage are all the same damn plant?  How did that happen? Artificial cross-breeding.  As in, genetic modification.  The Punnett Square is a diagram for genetic modification.

I did some pretty extensive research about GMOs a few years back and there is basically no evidence that they are dangerous.  They pose no health risks, they are no more susceptible to the dangers of monoculture than ‘normal’ crops.  And so on.

The problem is not GMOs, it’s the entire apparatus of industrial agriculture.  And while GMOs don’t fix those problems, they do potentially help at the margins.  Crops which are fixed to need less water require less damaging irrigation.  Crops which are nitrogen-fixed don’t require as much terrible terrible industrial fertilizer.

And the real, actual problem with GMOs is the way they are connected with international trade regimes.  The relationship between intellectual property law and seed design, the way that this generates rather extreme corporate control over farmers in the global South, these are real problems.  But labeling GMOs does absolutely nothing to fix them.

In short, all the people with Yes on 37 signs in their front yard, who can’t be bothered to at least get a Yes on 34 or Yes on 36 sign need to take a long look in the mirror and ask themselves why they care so much about the faux-problems of yuppies and care not a whit for the real problems of the actual downtrodden in California.

38 – The other tax initiative to pay for education.  NO.  I’ll just defer to Kevin Drum on this one, for a spot-on rant about the insanity of our system.  If this proposition contributes to Prop 30 failing, I will fly off the handle.

39 – Tax treatment for multi-state business.  YES.  I’m a bit torn on this one, but ultimately chose to support.  There’s a pretty silly loophole in California law that prevents it from gathering about $1 billion taxes due to the nature of out-of-state businesses.  Given how hard it is to pass any law about taxes through the legislature (thanks to Prop 13), this seems like the only way to get it done.  This proposition does, unfortunately, target about half of the revenue, which is the sort of ballot-box budgeting that drives me up the wall.  But a) it’s toward energy efficiency which isn’t the worst thing to spend on.  And b) it’s a temporary earmark, only lasting five years.  Given the likelihood of passing an alternative to this within the next five years, I’ll take the money and run.

40 – Redistricting.  YES.  This one is perhaps the silliest of them all.  The state Republicans put it on the ballot, but then gave up on it.  But the way it’s phrased, you have to vote YES to preserve the status quo.  There is no one supporting a No vote, including the people who got it on the ballot. But it can’t be removed.  And given the confusion caused by needing to affirm a proposition to preserve the status quo, I bet it only gets about 60%

I Didn’t See It Coming – Belle & Sebastian

Today in c’mon folks, think for a second, we’re talking about the gender gap.  A couple things:

First, when one poll comes out which tells you that the gender gap is non-existent, the correct response is not to run stories about The End of the Gender Gap.  The correct response is to assume that polls which are wild outliers are, you know, OUTLIERS.

Frankly, any article that is premised on the idea that a single poll can provide useful information about The State of the Race is just ridiculous.  We have eight daily tracking polls these days and a ton of other national and state polls.  I realize we are starved for definitive news but single polls at this point are just not news.

Second, when talking about the ‘gender gap’ it would be nice if you didn’t phrase it in terms that imply men are ‘normal’ voters while women vote based on identity. Unless you have some actual reason to think that is true in a specific case, then the claim is, well, kind of sexist.

It’s a pretty common trope, where whatever white guys are voting is the standard against which everything else is measured, and it’s not really that surprising that it lingers.  But it’s still aggravating.

Two Princes – The Spin Doctors

Theory: most debates don’t matter very much to the outcome of elections primarily because both sides have a strong incentive to argue that they won. The media therefore reports the competing claims, and even if it supplements that with some element of ‘objective’ external judgment, that element will be submerged under the general morass of competing stories.

In essence, the actual debate itself doesn’t matter a whole lot. Which makes sense, really. Anyone who is willing to flip their vote (or commit their vote) based on a 90-minute debate is pretty likely to switch it again thanks to some other event later.

The thing that can really swing some votes is a drawn-out narrative. If you keep hearing for a week that one candidate is in trouble, then that trouble will stick. This is essentially what happened with the first debate. Although the narrative that the debate single-handedly rescued Romney is overstated, it really does seem to have had a significant effect. There is pretty good evidence that a big swing happened in the immediate 24 hour aftermath (supplemented by a ‘normal’ correction that likely would have happened anyway), but that swing could have been a bounce rather than a more permanent shift if not for the coverage in the days that followed.

We’ll get another data point on this question over the next couple days. Debate #3 was, to put it bluntly, a crush. Romney looked out of sorts, basically conceded that he would just do the same foreign policy as Obama except with more bluster and less success, and got stung by the president on numerous occasions who was well-prepared this time to stick him to his past statements.

But unlike debate #1, where Obama’s mediocre performance provoked a firestorm of Democratic panic and self-flagellation, the Republican side has stuck to their guns. It’s pretty impressive that the unity has held, really. Romney played the same ‘I’m not really a conservative’ game, but did so far less successfully. You’d think that a fair portion of the far Right would be going nuts right now about Romney selling out conservative principles – and using that fact to explain why he lost the debate.

But no, they’re just chugging along claiming that it was Romney’s plan all along to lose the debate.

And that’s how you get reports on the debate like this, from Slate’s John Dickerson. He notes most of Romney’s weaknesses and implies strongly that Obama won the debate. His opening line, in fact, is “Mitt Romney brought a knife to a gunfight. A butter knife.” And yet he accepts the premise that this was a reasonable strategy of just trying to maintain the status quo.

But this is precisely what Obama tried to do in the first debate, for which he was raked over the coals. For some reason in this narrative, Romney looking like a deer in the headlights is reasonable strategy, while Obama’s use of the same ‘strategy’ was catastrophic.

What else? Well, according to Dickerson, “the immediate exit polls were mixed.” But they weren’t mixed. They range from clear Obama victory to absolute Obama crush. He asks rhetorically: “Partisans love this stuff, but do undecided voters? Do the voters who were with Obama in 2008, but think he’s tarnished his brand?” Well, once again we can look at the polls which indicate that yes, the voters DO like this stuff. It’s not perfect evidence, of course, because these polls have small sample sizes and can only capture a snapshot. But it’s better than no evidence.

This is precisely the sort of report that can only be written if the losing candidate (and all supporters) spin madly. It does conclude that Obama won the debate, basically, but does so in a way that will be hard to notice if you aren’t already looking for it.

It’s not a uniquely bad piece of journalism. It’s just a demonstration that journalism about debates is fundamentally pretty stupid. Journalists desperately want to avoid making editorial judgments about who ‘really’ won the debate. Which means they report about the spin and/or they try to imagine who ‘swing voters’ will think won the debate. Which just amounts to editorializing in a different (more hidden) way.

For more on this see Kevin Drum on the hack gap.

The Con– Tegan and Sara

Shorter Mitt Romney: I’m totally different from Bush in that I value good things and he was a bad president who by definition cannot have valued good things because his five-point plan didn’t work. My completely identical five-point plan, however, will rule. Because I value good things.

You want this snark expressed in video form?

Ties That Bind – Skankin’ Pickle

I see at Salon an interview with Katherine Fenton, the woman who asked the gender equity question in the debate. It’s…an extremely frustrating read. She emphatically states she is not a feminist. This despite the fact that she is cares deeply about “women’s equality in the workforce” and reproductive rights. But, she hastens to say, “I’m not only concerned with women.”

As if “feminism” can be defined as being “only concerned with women”!

Look, I don’t want to force anyone to self-identify in any particular way. And it’s not my place to tell people what they really are. So this isn’t a statement about her in particular. It’s just a general level of frustration.

I am a feminist. It’s because I care about equality and justice, and because I’m capable of recognizing that in a society built on inequality it takes more than generalized commitment to a principle to achieve it.

Cameron asks: who do you think will be better for women. Fenton responds: “That’s hard to say…I can only speculate, but if I had to guess, gosh, my gut says President Obama. Based on the fact that he has said, I know he has two daughters so the cause is close to him. Governor Romney has granddaughters, that might help.”

Oy vey.

How someone can care about this issue enough to ask about it in front of 60 million people, listen to the two answers, and then give this response…I just don’t know.

Let’s take a look at Romney on this question. He said 1) he hired binders full of women 2) women should be offered flexible work schedules so they can get home to cook dinner 3) I’ll grow the economy so much that employers “are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.”

For all the derision about binders, #1 is great. I’m glad he hired a lot of women for his cabinet. He did misrepresent the issue a bit, but all things equal I’m happy to hear he made an effort to hire more women. In fact, it’s a pretty great example of how affirmative action WORKS.

So #1 is a modest point in Romney’s favor. As for #2, it’s certainly the case that employment ought to take better account of family structures and the social context. But I’m not enthusiastic that the BEST example Romney could come up with is the need for women to be given jobs that allow them to continue all their domestic obligations.

One other thing you’ll notice about the first two things Romney said: they’re not policies. Would he do anything as president to encourage this sort of behavior? No, he would not. If employers want to keep paying women less, will he try to regulate them, or nudge them? No, he won’t.

So, what would Romney do to lessen workplace inequality? Nothing.

The jokes have mostly gone after the ‘binders’ part, but for me it’s part 3 of this response where the condescension really comes out. The shorter version of his comment: “if the economy is booming, employers will be so desperate for workers they’ll even be willing to hire women.” That’s an offensive comment on its face. But it goes deeper, too. Remember that the question was about pay inequality. Well, Romney’s answer takes it as a given that women are marginal workers who can’t get a job outside of an economic boom – and thus implicitly accepts and affirms the idea that they are less essential contributors to the workforce.

Howl – The Gaslight Anthem
Mae – The Gaslight Anthem

2012 is turning out to be a pretty good year for bands that sound like Bruce Springsteen. For one thing, Bruce himself came out with one of his best albums since the early 80s. Lucero’s got a solid record (to be reviewed at some future date here). And The Gaslight Anthem have a record that continues to legitimate their claim as the kings of the post-Bruce genre.

It’s called Handwritten, and you get the sense that this appeal to authenticity is not just an affective thing with them. In lyrics, style, attitude, and every other way imaginable, these guys want to communicate the importance of doing things the right way.

That means a lot of things. It means a commitment to the true spirit of rock and roll. It means believing that anthems of love and passion really do contain within them the possibility of becoming something more. That redemption is rare but real, and all the more precious because of its rarity. That the coolest kid around is the one who can dare to be earnest.

In this respect, this is the album where the Gaslight Anthem have become almost more Springsteen than the man himself.

By which I mean: this sounds like the album that Bruce Springsteen would write if he were a character in one of his own songs.

As I have written in the past, Bruce has always been a lot more skeptical than his critics have assumed. The Springsteen tropes exist not because they’re meant to reflect a real story of the world. No, they exist because they provide the background narrative of his imagined universe. They tell us what his characters want to believe about themselves. The guy who shows up at Mary’s door with the promise of redemption inhabits the same world as the Vietnam vet who lost his brother at Khe Sanh. And they both stand in as archetypes for the guy who is trying to write his novel and just can’t make it click.

Cars mean freedom, but they also represent wasted years spent on ephemera. The train is the universal metaphor—it takes us into the land beyond, brings us all together, forms the connective tissue of our greater psyche. And these vehicles scream to us of salvation and redemption. But the broader point, made clear only from the distance as the whole narrative blends together, is that redemption was never in the thing. Redemption is the thing, and it comes from our capacity to believe.

Look at Thunder Road. He sings “All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood,” and if you want to be ungenerous you would interpret that as a belief that the car is some simplistic metaphor for freedom. That the American Dream is found in some fuel-injected engine. But that’s not the point at all. No, it’s the act of offering that matters. The substance of the offer is what gives it a narrative hook. But if you treat the hook as the thing itself, you are doomed.

Of course, Springsteen drifts into that sort of cliché and self-parody at times. But at his best, there’s this additional level of depth. The characters may believe in the symbolism, but they are portrayed with a sympathy that lets us, the observers, see the larger magic at work.

The kid sits there with hand outstretched, and asks her to share his dream. But the dream is not the magic of the highway. It’s not the perfection of handwritten notes. It’s not the majesty of the river. The dream is the dreaming itself. The finding out, the testing, the endless faith in the possibility that there must be something more. And if we can’t find it here, then we just have to keep looking.

When we come to believe that the thing itself is our redemption, then we come out on the other side of Springsteen’s American Dream. On that side you see the sad lovers of Racing in the Street who can barely stand to look at each other anymore. Or the killer in Nebraska who can only believe in a ‘meanness in this world.’ Or the vet who has ‘nowhere to run, ain’t go nowhere to go.’

These are the anti-heroes, the ones who believed in something and saw it fall through. They are older, bereft of passion, leading lives of toil and pain. They’ve lost their belief. But it’s because the thing they believed in was the song instead of the singing.

And that’s the thing about this Gaslight Anthem album. Like I said, it is earnest from start to finish and wrought with a great deal of care. But as beautiful as it is, I can’t help but feel like it suffers a bit in comparison to the depth you hear in Springsteen. That is, this record is full of things to believe in, but it holds onto those things like talismans. And this can occasionally obscure WHY that belief is so powerful.

Don’t get me wrong; this is a great record. It’s just not quite as good as it needs itself to be. Because there is no narrative structure, these songs are experienced as little slivers of possibility. They are iconic, but lack the depth of possibility that places them in a larger pattern of meaning.

“Handwritten” gives us the songwriter, scratching out a song in the moonlight, transcribing the fullness of his own soul. It’s an ode to the way that music reaches across distance and possibility and connects us together. But you can’t help but wonder who this person is. What specifically drives him? The impulse to say that music is universal is powerful, but it trends too far into its own halo in the implication that the nature of this universality can be captured in the bared heart of the poet.

“Mulholland Drive” dances close to the edge. Phrased as a question, it asks the one who left what happened to all the promises. It threatens to come across like a vicious caricature, with the white knight who offered true love to rescue the girl who then repaid the debt by scorning him. If that’s what the hero is offering in terms of redemption, then I’ll happily pass. It’s the sort of song that has the potential to really reflect the grey areas where everyone is to blame and none are at fault. It just doesn’t quite make it.

The defining feature of the very best songs on the record is their capacity to get past this fascination with the thingness of an experience. For example, “Here Comes My Man” is a delicate portrayal of the ambivalence that comes from past loves. It succeeds because it portrays the experience rather than idea. And “Mae” provides the specificity that’s often missing elsewhere. You don’t just get the sense of longing – it’s conveyed in aching detail. And it’s here that the ode to the possibility of magic on the radio. Fallon sings “We work our fingers down to dust / while we wait for kingdom come / With the radio on” and you know precisely what it feels like.

The highlight of the record, though, has to be “Howl.” This seems to be a deliberate attempt to return to Thunder Road. There’s a girl whose dress waves, a guy with a car offering to take her away. But it’s pitched toward the future, to a Mary who said ‘no’ to the first offer. She stuck around, went to school, and made a life for herself. And now our hero sends out a final missive: you know where you can find me, and all those plans I made might still have some life in them. It works because it’s audacious, it works because it feels REAL, and it works because Fallon absolutely sticks his lines. “Radio, oh radio / do you believe there’s still some magic left somewhere inside our souls?” The pain is tangible, and the hope even more so. On an album that’s full of insistence that the radio really might just save us, this is the shining moment where it feels absolutely and completely possible. So when he sings “I waited on your call and made my plans to share my name” there’s nothing you can do but hope along with him.

“Howl” lasts just two minutes, but in that time it conveys all the possibility of this band. If they could spin that magic out over the course of the whole record, this might be the best record of the decade. As it is, it has to settle for merely being very very good.

[Edit: I’m an idiot and swapped the debates.  The one tomorrow is actually the town hall, which will be about basically anything people ask questions about.  The explicit foreign policy debate isn’t until next week.  Still, my general points stand, so I’ll leave this up]

So the second debate is coming up, and this one is going to be about foreign policy.  I predict more of the same from Romney, only more so. If you were frustrated last time by him asserting generalities and absolutely refusing to back those up with any detail, then you are going to be driven up the wall this time.

If you’re Team Obama, how do you prepare for this? Well, it’s actually pretty simple I think. Romney really doesn’t have any meaningful differences to highlight in terms of policy. Which just means he’s going to complain about RESULTS and try to completely ignore POLICY. That is: he’ll talk about how things are chaotic in Syria, how Iran is pushing for the bomb, how Afghanistan isn’t exactly peachy, how the power gap with China keeps getting smaller, etc. And then he’ll mouth extremely vague platitudes like the value of a ‘strong foreign policy’ and how he has a ‘commitment to American exceptionalism.’

In response, Obama needs to do two things, and do them over and over.

First, he needs to defend his accomplishments. Killed Bin Laden, wound down a terrible and wildly stupid war (and the less said about Afghanistan the better), prevented a genocide in Benghazi, foiled numerous attempted terrorist attacks on the US, Al Qaeda is a few radicals in caves these days. And so on. While I personally am more than a bit leery about some of those phrasings, I think they will work for him. Obama has more credibility on foreign policy than any Democratic candidate of my lifetime and ought to capitalize on it. He said he’d go into Pakistan if necessary, he did, and now Bin Laden is dead.

Romney will want to portray the violence in the Middle East as a problem. But Obama needs to come back over the top. Under my watch, dictators in the Middle East were toppled in the name of democracy. For all that there is trouble there, it’s the trouble that comes from people asserting the freedom and values that we all believe in. The previous administration instigated disastrous wars and provoked chaos. We have helped usher in more meaningful changes by giving the people in these countries the chance to assert their own freedom.

Second, he needs to press Romney repeatedly to clarify what he’d do differently. And he needs to do this by emphasizing the difference between himself and Bush. He needs to clearly and coherently identify these foreign policy issues as allowing for two basic responses: his, or the cowboy insanity of the Bush adminstration. And then put it to Romney: if you don’t like how I’m handling it, that must mean you want to put US soldiers in the middle of the conflict.

The beauty about this debate strategy is that it is almost perfectly resilient to anything Romney can say or do. If you construct your arguments correctly, Romney can weasel and dissemble all he wants – and it will appear as precisely that. Meanwhile Obama comes off as the adult in the room, the guy you can trust in a crisis.

It’s Not My Fault, I’m Happy– Passion Pit

The new album from Passion Pit seems like a classic case of the sophomore slump. Gossamer mimics many of the patterns of the first record without delivering them at quite the same level of energy. The production values are just a little bit higher, but not in a way that really makes you turn your head. And, most importantly, they don’t have a song that comes close to matching the hooks and the energy of “Moth’s Wings” or “Sleepyhead.” In fact, you can’t help but wonder if the higher levels of musical proficiency aren’t just covering up a bland re-tread of the original product.

After a couple listens, though, you realize that none of that stuff matters. This is a great record in large part because it doesn’t try to be anything more than it is. There is no one song with the huge hook to get all the hipsters bobbing their heads, no chorus that tries too hard to impress. It’s just 45 minutes of music that delivers perfectly on the promise of the album title. If ever there were gossamer music, it’s here.

The best example is “It’s Not My Fault, I’m Happy” which grows on me with every listen. It follows a pretty traditional song structure (verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/chorus) but they just do it so darn well that you couldn’t possibly care. I’m a huge fan of musical transitions, and there is no more basic form of that phenomenon than the shift from verse to chorus and back. And this song is pretty much a textbook example of how to do it right. The verses stamp along at a stately pace, the choruses come in like a ton of bricks and just when the sweetness of the chorus risk overwhelming you they come back with the august longing of the chorus. Rinse and repeat. It’s stupidly simple, but it takes a special kind of genius to stick the landing.

Elsewhere, “Constant Conversations” is the much slowed down version of the same effect, where they get a chance to show off the vocal harmonies. “Cry Like a Ghost” charts a middle course, with a slightly woozy blend of candy and buzzing synths. “Hideaway” is the quintessential case of a song that could strike you as a knockoff of themselves if you wanted to be ungenerous, but if you turn a slightly friendly ear to it will reveal itself as a pure pop gem.

Even the weaker tracks deliver pretty well. “Carried Away” is mostly filler, but it’s delicious filler. “On My Way” is mostly buildup without a lot of action, but the bit that starts about two minutes in is plenty enough payoff. And “Where We Belong” wants to convey a sense of atmospherics that it can’t quite pull off, but still feels like a perfectly reasonable denouement for the record.

It would easy to write this record off, but it would be a mistake.  The falsetto vocals, the sugary sound, these things make them seem just a little lightweight.  But they’re increasingly revealing themselves to be genuinely talented artists with a deep understanding of musical texture and the power of music to redeem the pain of everyday life.

State Hospital– Frightened Rabbit

It still seems like Frightened Rabbit is trying to find their feet a little bit. After the mind-melting beauty of The Midnight Organ Fight, anything was going to pale a bit in comparison. 2010’s Winter of Mixed Drinks went big, but couldn’t quite deliver the pathos to make it feel significant.

Since then, they’ve released a couple short EPs that play around with form a bit more. They struck gold with “Fuck This Place” last year, but combined it with a couple dreary songs that barely got into second gear. That’s much what happens on their recently released State Hospital EP. Two wonderful songs are patched together with three insubstantial ones.

The title song “State Hospital” is by far the best track here. It’s also the most fully realized vision of what the next great album from this band is going to sound like. It’s got some of the epic feel of the last record – you can imagine this blowing apart a stadium – but it has much more texture. The soft/loud dynamic is finely balanced, so that when they do eventually light the fuse it doesn’t feel contrived. It’s emotionally fraught, but doesn’t pretend to the same kind of shattering intimacy from The Midnight Organ Fight. Which is an important thing for them. It speaks well of their ability to paint a picture of damage and loss, rather than rending open the wounds directly and letting the viscera pour out. This is a more fully realized artistic object, less powerful perhaps, but making up for it with superb craftsmanship.

The other very strong track is “Home From War.” Again, it certainly still sounds like a Frightened Rabbit song, but is notably distinct as well. In fact, it reminds far more of their debut record than the more full-bodied stuff that has come since. All their best songs in recent years have felt like tidal forces, but this one feels a lot more like a train rattling down a track. It’s a nice change.

So that’s the good. These two songs, combined with the previously mentioned “Fuck This Place” highlight everything great about where this band is going. Unfortunately, the other songs on the EP don’t really live up to that promise. “Boxing Night” sounds like a song that’s halfway done. It’s got the component parts but doesn’t appear to have been built into an actual song. It just chugs along without variation until it’s done. “Off” is much further off the beaten path for them, but only because it seems to have given up on the idea of a melody or rhythm. And the less said about “Wedding Gloves” the better. Yikes.

Bottom line: “State Hospital” is the only must-own song here, but if you’re anything close to as big on this band as me, you’ll want to get the whole thing just to see where they’re going.