In Guards We Trust — Guards
Listener giggling overtakes rapture roughly one minute into
the third track of Guards’ debut album In
Guards We Trust. By this point, the
first two songs in the album history of Guards (they have a prior EP) have already
featured an entire Ebay server worth of instruments and vocals—and then “Rough
and Ready To Go” dials the sounds-and-instruments crunch up to 12 while also bringing
forth both chimes and a deliriously lovely melody. So when the lads start singing, “We’re rough
and ready to go,” they sound every bit the latter, and an entire wormhole
removed from the former. There is no roughness here. But Guards sound very ready to go.
Where they seem to be going is down a brambly-yet-technicolor
path that slants away from most indie trends and off toward its own peculiar
overgrown Oz-like fate. In the long-forgotten
olden days of yore, i.e. the 1990s, this obliquely lush trail of indie
orienteering was machete’d into reality by long-gone bands like Moose, whom these
days basically no one has ever heard of.
Moose put out a trio of weird and wonderful albums over a
near-decade of time in business, and then disappeared before anyone fell in
love with any of them. All of the albums
were melodic and interesting, and all were topped off with layers of
instruments and effects: dense works
which, when combined with a nice set of headphones, could each eclipse a lazy
afternoon of free time.
The fun didn’t end there.
More recently, a similar tack was taken on a super-accomplished debut
album in 2011 by a UK group called Cashier No. 9. Whom these days…basically no one has ever
heard of.
This shared fate is curious, because there is a ton of
talent, and quite a bit of good product, in the histories of these bands. The melodies were there, the music was
well-produced and frequently gloriously easy to enjoy, and yet it all seems to
have met the fate of a raindrop landing on a neon sign. There is nothing left but hiss and glow.
There are important differences this time around! After the obligatory odd/interesting lead-off
track “Nightmare,” Guards begin to earnestly take flight. “Giving Out (track 2,) “Rough and Ready To Go
(track 3,) and “Silver Lining “(track 4) all feature bombastic hooks and
flourishes. Background vocals leave
contrails across the sky. Guitars attack
and retreat back into the haze. The
combined effect is probably a notch or two beyond what the bands mentioned
above were ever able to build in the grand scheme of songcraft, and the fact
that it all arrives as a debut therefore seems particularly special.
“Silver Lining” is probably the album’s purest incarnation
of a pop song. Clocking in at two
minutes and 58 seconds, with three revs through the chorus, a nice noodling
guitar melody, and two brief guitar
solos, it does not risk death by overthinking.
The lyrics widely avoid the same complexity pratfalls:
I wanna live forever in a boat out
in the sea
I wanna build a happy home, a home
for you and me
I wanna touch the silver lining
who’ll be shining everywhere
I wanna live forever, I don’t care
If the final formulation of this song weren’t such clever
off-kilter pop music, there would be much to mock here. But the chorus of singing voices, the solid
guitar work, and the flashes of brass notes here and there should be enough to
win over most hardened indie soles.
(sic)
The air calms a bit by track 6 “Not Supposed To,” but the
harmonizing continues to impressive effect.
In fact, it might be the recurrent multi-tracked vocals that deserve ultimate
credit for elevating In Guards We Trust
above the horizon line of historical precedent.
The summed effect isn’t necessarily Beach Boys-pretty, but it is
frequently powerful and always pleasant.
The album’s constellation of oddball invocations does not
dim on the journey though its latter half. For example:
“I Know It’s You” features a wandering organ melody seemingly foisted
straight from the archives of one-off baggy band Inspiral Carpets. (This, by the way, neatly completes a
trifecta of musical reference points for what must be an enormous payout at
very, very long odds.) While it sets off
from Madchester, the track eventually chugs and roars into a well-deconstructed
breather at the midpoint, and closes with a spacey little outro as well. These songs do not arrive without some
significant amount of thought and regard.
It is the same tendency toward careful consideration that
probably explains the seemingly nonrandom pair of misfires on In Guards We Trust. In both cases (“Heard the News” and “Coming
True,”) the band seem to confuse Guitars That Sound Like Emergency Sirens with Guitar
Effects That Are Interesting. The
spillover of one miscalculation into two separate tracks implies that a single
stone, well-aimed, will be sufficient to clean it up for next time.
The album isn’t all manic lush pop, and the detours are
frequently as interesting as the main thoroughfare. The
most interesting of these is the lurch into the desert southwest of “Can’t
Repair.” The reverb is overdone, the
guitar strings have turned to western spaghetti, and Guards are suddenly
channeling their inner Hooded Fang.
Except for this: they are so
great when it comes to melody that “Can’t Repair” is more of a hoot than just about
anything on the last two Hooded Fang albums.
And finally, elegantly, to drive the point home, this: album closer “1 & 1” is quite simply the
best Moose song since Moose ceased to exist (a sentence which is sure to
unleash a torrent of humanity upon the world’s local record stores.) It is an unrushed masterstroke, and a hopeful
parting shot.
It is nearly impossible to enjoy In Guards We Trust without wondering, historical precedents being
what they are, whether the band will succeed or even continue to exist for very
much longer. Certainly the footsteps before them seem to
cease abruptly, and not very far ahead down the path. It is treacherous business to try to create
intricately structured little pop songs; it is the taunting of an
oxymoron. The songs themselves, however,
may provide the best advice for how to navigate this concern: for now, don’t overthink it.
Keepers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12
July 2013
