Broken Bells: Broken Bells

I feel like, in a lot of my recent reviews, I've chucked around a lot of adjectives. And while it's very difficult to describe something without using, you know, descriptive words, I'm running out of options, having a hard time keeping myself from repeating, and just generally working harder to come up with elaborate turns of phrase that are both clever and accurate. So I'm resolving to chill out on the over-description for the time being, until I find an album that is truly worth it. This is fair enough, because I think the only word needed to describe Broken Bells by Broken Bells (aiiee, my first self-titled!) is "atmospheric." Now I'm gonna spend like 700 words trying to explore what that means.

To me, it means that there's room to get up in between the sounds on this record. There's not a ton going on, but the slight instrumentation melds into a powerful serving. Unlike, say, Sleigh Bells, which uses a very limited number of elements and disorients, Broken Bells aims to hypnotize. Keyboards and acoustic guitars take turns softly humming in tracks and between them. The percussion is slight enough to fall into the background, but funky enough to keep the music going.

A lot of the time it's effective. "The High Road," which kicks off the album, is an instant winner with its humalong chorus. "Trap Doors" carries you away with great ease and swells underneath you.

"The Ghost Inside" would be another great tune with its really neat groove if it weren't for its Achilles heel: falsetto male vocals. Oy! If you've got a set of testes your name isn't "Prince" (or "Formerly-Known-As"/unpronounceable symbol/whatever) it's un-advisable to make a go at them. It's not a good expressive mode and tends to say "I'm trying too hard." Even though it's a good song. And while "October" takes a bit of a while to go from its twinkling piano introduction to its moment of release, it's mostly worth the trip.

So that's the double-edged sword of being "atmospheric." It's music that gives the listener time to move through and really take it all in, but if the listener is ready to move on before the music does, it gets irritating. When a song spends too much time contemplating itself without offering its listener something in return, it gets boring, as this CD sometimes does. Sometimes even in good tracks. Broken Bells plays catch and release with its listener at bit too much, if that makes any sense. The back end of the CD gets like that, and it might take you until halfway through "Mongrel Heart" to really notice the song you're listening to. By then it's on to "The Mall and Misery," which brings you back down to Earth by flirting with riffs and a few charging drum beats.

So that's "atmospheric." It's soft and subtle, but sometimes dull, especially if they try too hard to sustain it too long. What's more, it's a little too self-serious, so when James Mercer asks "What amounts to a dream anymore? / A crude device; A veil on our eyes" I find myself asking him to lighten up a bit. This song has a nice but overly-measured wigout moment in the chorus, which uses the falsetto better than "Ghost Inside."

But if you really want to know what I'm talking about, it's the bossa nova-tinged "Your Head Is On Fire," with its whispering chorus and subtle strings. In it, Mercer sounds vocally like Rivers Cuomo, but more relaxed than Cuomo's ever sounded in his career (and I like Cuomo,) but the song doesn't quite get there, which happens a lot here.

It was tough, getting older and learning that not all music had to rock hard to be good. I can even kinda hear the 15-year-old Scotto screaming at me across the decade for digging this CD as much as I do, but in the years since I've been him I've learned a bit more to value the nicer, lighter touches. I'm not all about it, but it has its place. This reminds me of The Beta Band, but I can't listen to the Beta Band for too long.

This album has a lot of charms but it doesn't seem to know how it wants to spent 10 tracks. Maybe it's just electrified elevator jazz, maybe it's this year's The XX, maybe it's just good soft tones for twentysomethings to have dispassionate, anonymous makeouts to. If any of this sounds good to you, check out at least a few tracks.

One snappy line to conclude the review: "The high road is hard to find," and they find it at least once in that song, but have trouble getting back to it. Zing.

Buy this album from iTunes now!