Marble Index: Watch Your Candles Watch Your Knives

A few months back, I brought you the unfortunate story of The Marble Index, who made a great debut record sometime last decade, and are now no longer together. I lauded that one for its direct, bracing rock attack. The instruments sweep up and overflow the sound, drowning out vocals and letting whatever hooks emerge through the din, rather than be finely crafted around them. It was a great way of boiling down exactly what guitar music can be, without sounding stark or stripped. Very full, in fact.

But nothing on that record could have prepared me for their follow-up, Watch Your Candles Watch Your Knives. Here, they step up their game and level up to the standards of the greatest popular rock acts of the past decade. And that's when it becomes a fucking travesty that nobody you know owns this record (except, I suppose, me.) While the last one was pretty stonewalled, take-it-or-leave-it cellar rock, this music was meant to reach ears.

It begins modestly, with the toe-tapping Morse code riff of "Everyone Else," with a bit of call-and-answer lyrics. It wiggles up and down chord progressions subtle, getting a weird, secretly ingratiating hook and a refreshing no-bullshit chorus, much like the previous album. But immediately there's a difference. The instrumental aspects separate themselves out pretty clearly, and Brad St. Germain's vocals are pushed to the fore. Rather than seeming to sing along with the guitars, the guitars are now following his vocals' lead. Note that St. Germain is both the signer and guitarist for the band, doing a great job with both.

While that opening track hints at a bit of growth, they really let loose with the second track, the raucous "All That I Know," which swings an easy-breezy twisting British Invasion swagger. The song is an immediate call to attention, building to an intense climax. What this song signifies, which is borne out on the rest of the album, is that as proficient as the band was with its instruments on the debut, here they have totally refined their songwriting. While those earlier songs had a purity that must have emerged from garage type jams , here we have a real sense of songwriting logic pulling each track through hooks and refrains that really ingrain themselves to the listener. "Couldn't Do Without" has a particularly interesting one, with its spiking guitars creating tension and a chorus that seems to descend just a half-note too little (I don't know theory so good so bear with me if that's not correct) which seems to stretch it out, prolonging the angst, before finally resolving in the last pass.

Other great songs dotting the album, which might have been exemplary tracks on the previous, are the dreamy ode "Let Me Be The One," the lavalike "What We Need" and a couple of venomous late-album cuts, "Not Impressed" and "Same Old Lie," which really catch fire. Here, they're merely decent goes, fleshing out the twelve tracks with character and spirit without stealing the show. After the excellent "All That I Know," there are five other tracks that compete for best of the album. So that means half the twelve tracks are great, and the other half are as excellent as anything I've heard all in my 6 months of blog-musicking.

"Same Schools" hits this awesome anthemic riff that perfectly invokes nostalgia and hope for the future. There's something really great about the way the lyrics are delivered, "We went to the same schools / Were told to follow all of the same old rules", wondering how people diverge over time. At least I assume so, since no lyrics available. In any case, that's my interpretation. It rings out like a souped-up Big Star. (Drummer Adam Knickle, whom you may recall I worked with for a while, convinced me to buy their first two albums, so I don't think it's a stretch to call them an influence.)

I think "Same Schools" is a great song, but even that can't prepare for the pure roaring hookiness of "We Always Complain," whose only flaw is that there isn't another chorus or two. It's one of those great songs you feel like you know, not because it's cliche but because it works in a classic sense and renews what you like about those similar songs. And lurking just around the corner after that is the wicked wild west disco of "I Don't Want To Try To Change Your Life," which unwinds in such a sinister way before erupting in another blaze. Its chugging bassline and shout-along middle eight proves exactly how interested the band had become in wrapping its songs into new forms that still set comfortable in the roaring rock of the album. And this leads right to the roaring, stomping "Anytime," which is as joyful and celebratory as it gets for this band, and asks "Now that you've filled your heart with blood / Is there any room for love?"

The set draws to a close with the skillfully-built "Never Ends," winding around a riff that seems like a burning fuse leading to a glorious cut-loose vocal that blends punk screaming with smooth crooning. Eventually it brings the record to its close with a refrain that winds out into echoing darkness, pounding with drums and guitars all right on. It's a great cap off to an album that starts like a brick wall and then allows itself to crumble brick by brick and it devises new ways to reach the listener.

My issue with the first album was that as strong as the music was, it was a bit willfully reckless and obscure. It lacked those ear-catching hooks that most listeners need to be drawn into a song, that will get it pushed out on the radio. Perplexingly, this album has those in spades, with tight songcraft and energetic musicianship, singalong choruses and muscly riffs, way more substantial than what you typically get on a hit "modern rock" record, crafted from vintage plans yet with the spirit and energy of the new. And it still went mostly unheard.

The legend of Big Star's first album, #1 Record, was that any song on it could have been a hit, but the record company dropped the ball on actually getting the album in stores, so it remained undiscovered. This may turn out to be the case of this record, which is a shame. This is sort of the reason I started doing this blog, to catch the music I'd been missing out on all along. I hope that, even if not with this album in particular, then at some point I steer you toward something you wouldn't otherwise have heard. Every time that happens, I feel like I'm doing it right.

Buy this album from iTunes now!