3 out of 5

Label: Pitch-a-Tent

Producer: Tom Fox (engineered by)

With hints of the more developed fare to come, CVB is by no means an ‘average’ album as judged by the rating.  It nips from the college rock of their debut, some of the wandering musings of II & III, and shows compositional evolution and more a balanced use of the group’s trademark playfulness.  Yet in doing all of this, CVB becomes one of the group’s most even-keeled recordings, listenable from start to finish without any tracks that feel like sidenotes or, in the era of digital music, would get skipped over on a playlist.  The flipside is that there aren’t really any singles that stand out either.  I almost always forget about this album when the group wanders back into my listenings, and then I’ll put it on out of curiosity and suddenly get stuck on it.  ‘Joe Stalin’s Cadillac’ and ‘We Saw Jerry’s Daughter’ have the same loose playing style as most of ‘Telephone’ and are sung with Lowery’s full-on smirk, but lack the stomp of ‘Lassie’ or the kind of humorous abandon that led to ‘Skinheads.’  Again, this doesn’t lessen the potential enjoyment of either track, but they belong to the maturing sound of this record, with Segel’s violin becoming more integral as a juxtaposing element and not just an extra piece of genre mash and Lowery’s lyrics by no means serious but stretching a bit more for linearity and meaning.  Elsewhere ‘Five Sticks’ and ‘Une Fois’ show that the growth doesn’t mean the group has abandoned experimentation, and ‘The History of Utah’ is pretty damned close to a classic, one of the weirdo narrative tales that sells a lot of ‘Key Lime Pie.’

When you’re listening to CVB for stand-outs, it can kind of stretch on.  But if you just leave the record spinning and let the band guide the listen, it proves to be a lot of fun and interestingly powerful at points, especially the call-out of closer ‘Shut Us Down.’  A pretty perfect straddling of the early version of this group’s various formats.