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(Reviews Editor)
Label: Geffen - Rating:
The album opens onto the listener like a cool, soft breeze through an open window in a spacious house. While the song builds and builds toward a momentous conclusion there appears within the disparate elements that comprise the first track, a sense of exuberance and freedom. It’s comparable to The Shin’s “Sleeping Lessons,” the first track on Wincing the Night Away, except that this song uses such unusual combinations as synthesizers and heavily reverbed surf guitar elements before plunging into a cascade of drums and up-front distortion. If one can picture The Shins, Arcade Fire, and Interpol having a night under the stars together while they look at the band Love is All through binoculars, it might portray the emotional underpinnings of the opening song.
And this is the energy they’re supposed to carry through the whole album. The band, however, chooses sides with Interpol, Joy Division, and possibly The Smiths on the next track, and pretty much throughout the remainder of the album. It has drive and glides through dark, murky territory, as though reaching a hand out the window of an airplane through air filled with black smoke, travelling quickly enough to get through it but deep enough within it to let it soak in. It’s the perfect music to share the low pitch of a summer night’s darkness while exploring the frequency of nostalgia, or just background music to a good make-out session.
Like White Lies? Check out: Interpol, Joy Division, Dark Room Notes.
