 Degeneration Street, the fifth album by Montreal's the Dears, should, in theory, sound like sweet redemption. Following the release of and tours behind 2006's Gang of Losers, the Dears founder Murray A. Lightburn lost most of his long-time band to attrition. That album had been the most successful for the Dears, though, with support from the label Arts & Crafts and respectable chart positions in Britain and Canada. The Dears-- dubbed "probably the best new band in the world" just years before by NME-- seemed to be falling. While the split almost ended the Dears, Lightburn and keyboardist Natalia Yanchak persevered, recruiting friends and former collaborators to piece together 2008's Missiles. The change felt welcome, too, as Missiles was a textured, pensive album, tempering some of the Dears' bombast with well-considered arrangements. Lightburn soon got his band back, reassembling the six-piece version of the Dears for months of intense writing, rehearsing, and recording. That convocation, however, is about as happy as this story gets: Overwrought, overemphatic, and overly suggestive of a band that's using its second chance to go for the big time, Degeneration Street is a miserable album.
Everything Degeneration Street attempts feels a bit too emphatic. When it rocks, it heads for the arenas; when it slinks, it seeks the cover of low, gray clouds. That problem has two-fold consequences. First, it makes many the songs maudlin and melodramatic, occasionally unbearable. What's more, it makes each Dears approach-- heavy rock insurgencies, sweeping synthesizer ambles, big breezy janglers-- seem that much more polar. The album feels scattered and uneven, like a band without direction or restraint.
The individual looks aren't so appealing, either: During "Blood" and "Stick w/ Me Kid", the Dears race through would-be alternative rock anthems-- and here, alternative rock is meant to suggest sterilized Smashing Pumpkins, or something like Collective Soul-- with stock rock guitars and vocal effects as dated as ClipArt. "Galactic Tides" and the closing title track suggest the limpid, clammy post-Britpop echoes of Starsailor and Elbow, with studio tricks and ornate instrumental flourishes doing their best to mask songs that don't say too much. The chiming guitars and skittering drums of "Unsung" are facsimiles of Radiohead after 2003, but the song's big, dumb chorus-- "We're too/ We're too young," shouted for triumph-- conjures Coldplay in the worst way. There's a little bit of Arcade Fire, some Neil Diamond, maybe a little bit of TV on the Radio: From end to end, it feels as though the Dears are strewing sounds about the studio, making a last-ditch effort to make anything stick....full text |
| Dears leader Murray Lightburn has a dramatic streak wide as his Canadian homeland, and his group's fifth LP gives it plenty of elbow-room. A four-part song cycle involving apocalyptic prophecy and frozen hell, Degeneration Street often reads as art-rock with a death-metal storyline: With a few tempo changes, "Blood" could pass as a Mastodon cover. Yet musically, the LP is a shuffle mix: "Galactic Tides" is an End-time prayer done in Thom Yorke falsetto, "Yesteryear" a Motown strut with choir and harpsichord. Lightburn's amoebic tenor is still the main attraction: soul crooner one minute, punk shouter the next, he's a prime candidate for rock's next Broadway musical....full text |
| Moody, atmospheric, highly melodic indie pop from Canada -- these days folks don't seem to be able to get enough of it, but it should be noted that The Dears were there first, and they wrote the book on the subject. The world at large will be reminded of that fact by the band's fifth album, Degeneration Street. The Dears engaged the services of Tony Hoffer (Beck, Belle and Sebastian, BRMC, et al) to produce their new batch of tunes, and they tried to address the irksome phenomenon of album leaks in an unusual way: by playing the album in its entirety at live shows before the record's release, in an effort to help satiate fans' curiosity. But did that strategy help The Dears' cause or did it simply increase their audience's hunger for the newly recorded material even further? Hmmmm......full text |
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