Zeus: Say Us

It begins simply, with the anxious tapping of percussion, the drumsticks against the rim of the snare drum, and ends in a swell of instruments, pianos, slide guitars, gorgeously drenched harmonies and whirling organs. In the twelve tracks it takes to get there, everything happens. Maybe.

At first glance, the debut album by Zeus seems to be easy to put your finger on, but the more I listened to it, the more overtaken I was by its various elements. The songs are too well-constructed to be jammy trips, and yet just a step or two off balance with pop songwriting. The instruments, passed from member to member along with the microphone, are rarely used the same way twice. Albums like Say Us are the reason I like albums: sometimes they add up to a beguiling whole that goes beyond the individual songs on them. And as distinct as those songs are, they still feel unified, propelled from one to the next, broken only by the imaginary, fabricated designation on the package: "Side A / Side B."

"How Does It Feel?" the song that opens the album with those taps (which soon give way to sympathetic pianos and mocking guitars,) unfolds in its 2:49 as a blueprint for the rest of the album: do as much as you can, one thing after the other, as well as possible. So when the guitars and pianos clash back and forth like a duet, the guitars raise the stakes with a blistery solo but the pianos get the last laugh as they climb into the clouds for that last chorus.

Like that song, the album slowly unfolds itself, showing its tricks one after another and never lingering, never repeating. It's like (don't say it, urges a voice inside me,) Abbey Road, where every contributor is given full support and helps build the whole, whether it be the country-blues of "The River By The Garden" or the hazy "Fever Of The Time." None of it feels like a genre exercise, and though the mysterious lyrics often keep the listener at bay, it also never has to reach for sincerity. It's all in the expression.

The second half excites me more than the first, with one of the finest moments coming in the changeover between "You Gotta' Teller" and "I Know." The former track is a monstrous, charged, organ-based thundering rocker that sounds like Vanilla Fudge doing "You Keep Me Hanging On." The latter is a dreamy, galloping plea for sympathy. When the urgent heat of "Teller" is finally brought to its end, there's just a brief moment of quiet, before the cool breath of "I Know" drifts in with its quivering beauty. "Now I know, now I know / How it feels, how it feels..." although what "it" is is never explicitly said. The lyrics throughout this thing as a whole form an exhaustive exploration of communication.

No matter who is writing each individual song, or who is playing what, most of them tend to come back to: thinking, feeling, speaking, hearing, interpreting, understanding, wondering, knowing and telling. The songs encompass this impressive scope by doing their work to convey or obscure feelings. "Marching Through Your Head," with its pulsing pianos, manages to get into sound that feeling of pacing back and forth trying to work out a problem with your lover, "Do you feel it all the time / the way she preys upon your mind? / She's a fiend for your love, and that's all..." combined with the most effective hook on the album, the one that will most likely be marching through your head, but will keep surprising you when you come back to it. Or the loving, longing "The Sound of You," which takes a person's voice as their essence, and wonders, "How could we know, how could we know, how could we know?" The album closer (after the gathering storm of "Heavy On Me") is "At The Risk of Repeating," which is another tune about trying to get at the heart of the matter and still coming up short. But what words can't say, music often does. That music often has enough power, or enough charm, to keep you coming back.

I don't know if it's really the musical variety, or the lyrical mystery that kept me coming back to this album. It's just amazing how good it sounds, how well it does quiet and modest, as well as powerful and anguished. The boys in Zeus attack their tunes like a bunch of seasoned vets taking on excellent new material: the music is in them and it's in their nature to get it out.

Say Us doesn't make a grand statement, it's a rather unassuming record with many great surprises that aren't necessarily obvious the first time you listen. You'll think "This is a pretty good song," once or twice every five minutes and put it away and forget it, but if even a scrap of a tune remains in your brain, you'll want to take it out again and sooner or later it'll get into you. Tellingly, Zeus' debut EP (does anyone buy those or are they just a lark?) was called Sounds like Zeus. And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with any easier way to explain their sound. I even stooped to a Beatles comparison. But, speaking as a guy who has struggled to express himself once or twice in the past (I know, hard to believe,) this album speaks for itself. It's something you've just gotta feel for yourself.

Buy this album from iTunes now!

Say Us by Zeus was the third installment in my 4-part "Favourites of 2010" -- it comes in at #2, ahead of Broken Social Scene's Forgiveness Rock Record and Be in Love by Locksley.