Apollo Sunshine - "Brotherhood of Death" (mp3)

Three years ago, I fell head over heels for Apollo Sunshine, a band from Boston that played in Baltimore a couple times opening for locals and completely blew me away and made me an instant fan. I called one of those shows the best I saw in 2005 and wrote a rave review of their self-titled 2nd album for Stylus (they gave it a B, but in my mind it was an A), and put it at #2 on my year-end list. So needless to say, my hopes were pretty high for their new album, Shall Noise Upon, which is out on CD this week (and was released digitally about a month ago). It was my most anticipated album of 2008. And now that it's finally here, I don't really like it. At all.

A couple months ago, I mentioned that lately there's been "a ton of new albums by people whose last album I loved, all trying and failing to top it," but how those releases for the most part didn't register as really heartbreaking disappointments, either because those artists were well along in their careers and I could take the good with the bad in stride, or because they didn't seem to be on an upward trajectory anyway. But Apollo Sunshine had two pretty great records under their belt, and seemed to be on the cusp of something amazing, so my almost complete lack of affection for Shall Noise Upon is a pretty huge bummer to me. I'm almost feeling that kind of adolescent "what the fuck did you do to this band I love?" anger that I probably haven't felt upon buying a record since I was maybe 17. When a band drops a lame album after you've hyped them incessantly for years, it's kind of like telling everyone about this singing and dancing frog, and when they finally turn around to look it just sits there and ribbits. I'm actually only really getting fully annoyed when I read the mostly really positive reviews of the album, which tell me that either critics didn't hear the band's first 2 albums, or completely missed what was great about them.

Apollo Sunshine's 2003 debut, Katonah, was an uneven but often brilliant bit of modern psychedelia, with overdub-crazy production and a handful of amazing songs full of huge hooks, complex structures and abrupt moodswings. Their self-titled follow-up was a more naturalistic recording of a band playing in a room together, but their chemistry and their songwriting only improved, and virtually half the songs featured jaw-dropping guitar solos. Shall Noise Upon on the other hand, goes back to the layered detailed production style of Katonah while stripping away almost everything that made the band great once. The rhythms and structures are monotonous and predictable, the songs are sleepy and gently sung, with few of the enthusiastic vocals or surrealistic lyrical touches of the earlier material, and guitarist Sam Cohen completely wastes his great talent by scarcely soloing on the entire album. The difference between the band a few years ago and the band heard on Shall Noise Upon is epitomized by "Money," which sounds completely neutered here compared to the arrangement the band played live in 2005. Both the lead vocal and the guitar solo are dialed down several notches in intensity, and the song feels like a pale shadow of what it once was.

I don't know what happened to this band; they're recognizably the same band that once recorded something as brimming over with energy and ideas as "I Was On The Moon," but it seems like they're on a whole different trip now, playing up their hushed campfire music side, without any new songs as affecting as earlier quiet numbers like "Phone Sex." And even with song titles like "666: the Coming of the New World Government" and "Brotherhood of Death" (one of the only real rowdy moments on the whole album), they sound more touchy-feely than ever for the most part. Maybe this album was kind of a detour for them, something they wanted to do for a while before going back to being a great absurdist roots rock band in the tradition of Little Feat, and their next album will have the same energy as their earlier material. Or maybe this is their new direction, in which case I just hope they still play some of the old stuff live.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 02, 2008 at 9:48 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.