Album Review: Should- The Great Pretend
If you haven’t heard of the band Should, that’s okay. They
have a near un-Googleable name, and over the course of their 20+ year
existence, the duo have now just gotten around to releasing their fourth LP, The Great Pretend.
Originally from Texas, now hailing from Baltimore, Should
started to receive latter day recognition when the very hip New York based
label Captured Tracks started (and has since quickly abandoned) its Shoegaze
Archives project, selecting Should’s long out of print A Folding Sieve as the inaugural release. The project originally
set out to introduce people to contemporaries to the “big” names of the
Shoegazing genre—My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, et. al—but never received as
wide of recognition.
Originally released in 1995, A Folding Sieve is a nice slice of noisy, blissful pop music, and
the band was able to maintain that edge on the follow up—1998’s Feed Like Fishes. Save for reissuing A Folding Sieve in 2002, the band was
relatively dormant until 2011, dropping their very grown up sounding Like a Fire Without Sound—a record that
showed the band copping some very reserved, Yo La Tengo at their quietest, vibes.
Those quiet, reserved vibes, and grown up sounds have
shifted into near “adult contemporary,” #cooldad rock territory on The Great Pretend. It’s certainly not a
bad album, or to the point of unlistenable. Overall, it just lacks any
emotional weight and sonic punch, with some of the songs coming off as a little
lifeless and very non-energetic.
In comparing the very laid back atmosphere the band attempts
to create on The Great Pretend, it’s
a nearly night and day comparison to the sound they achieved 20 years ago by
using borrowed equipment, creating a unique guitar tone by building songs off
of samples pieced together from guitar chords recorded to cassette—distorting
it all with a 4 channel mixer. “Dalliance” is the only song out of the 11 here
that even comes close to that crunchy, overdriven sound.
The album’s first single, “Down a Notch,” is certainly
catchy, well crafted pop song, but it is also incredibly sleepy sounding—the
kind of thing that would fit in rather well in the rotation on the adult
contemporary station out of Minneapolis—Cities 97. And a song like “A Lonely
Place” is kind of the quintessential “adult” sound Should had found—it’s
dreamy, and pretty, sure; but again, the lack of energy makes it not very
captivating.
It’s the lack of energy and this sleepy vibe—the kind of
album that kind of slows down time a little, like an aimless autumn Sunday
afternoon—that makes The Great Pretend
not so much a chore to listen to, but it makes it a little less accessible of a
record, and certainly not very exciting of a record to listen to. There are
also some head-scratchers on here as well—vocalist and guitarist Marc Ostermeier
appears to be going for some kind of Ian Curtis deadpan delivery on “Amends,”
and it just seems very out of place when compared to the rest of the album. And
the closing track, “Don’t Get to Know Me,” is the kind of song that seems like
it was written with the intent of being a final song—it plods along somewhat
dramatically, awkwardly attempting a kind of sensation of grandeur.
You know, I get a lot of shit around here, and other places,
for how negative my reviews can be. I can’t say that I go into every review
with a good attitude or without predisposition. If I only reviewed things that
I like 100%, and found next to no faults with, this site would rarely be
updated. This just comes with the territory of “music criticism,” if you can
even use that phrase to describe what I do.
I genuinely like the band Should, and this is one of the few
times where I feel kind of guilty about not liking something. I don’t know this
band personally, or anything, but it’s a record that, when I first heard it was
coming out, I was really looking forward to it. I’ve been putting this review
off for awhile actually—this came out on March 25th—just because I’ve
been trying to find…nicer things to say about it.
I can’t force myself to like something. And yes it’s okay to
not like something; you just have to be able to articulate your reasons why.
This record is just not speaking to me the way their previous works had. It isn’t,
by any means, the worst thing I’ve heard in 2014, and it certainly is “listenable,”
it’s just unfortunately not the kind of thing that is going to stick with me.
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