3 out of 5

Minus the Bear!  These Arms Are Snakes!  Pretty Girls Make Graves!  I know – Kill Sadie seems like the birthing ground for several notable acts, it’s exciting backtracking your favored band’s history and discovering this shared ancestor, eagerly procuring the music and slobbering in anticipation of some mystical prototypical sound…

Kill Sadie do provide the prototype, sure enough, and acknowledgements to anyone who followed the path in its properly chronology, digging the band during its existence and knowing to get into MtB and TAAS before the rest of us, but…  But…  Experiments is an accurate name; Experiments is a god-awful mess.

Awful, he said, and then gave it three stars.  Yeah, I might be being kind, but once you’ve tested the Sadie waters and know what to expect (namely a lot of songs that seem scared to be classifiable), you can go back and relisten to the album and really hear what they got right, plus hear the promise smarter ears mayhaps were attuned to.

Prior to that, though, you hear all the signs of a group too purposefully struggling against their hardcore associations.  Later years would show evolution in the genre Sadie were toying with, which is the screamo-pop that Blood Brothers evolved into, or that Victory records translated into emo hits during the early 00s; at this stage – and this album was their last step before band members took their ideas in their own directions – the pieces don’t quite gel, with Steve Snere’s howl way too dynamic for Erin Tate’s jazzy drumming, and the guitar work a little too crisp – but not quite technical enough – for either one.  Cory Murchy’s noodly bass trails behind, uncertain of which act to follow.  This group of talent but not like minds tried to meet in a middle by combining all things.  The result is summarized in 6 minute opener The Ivy League Donor, which trades off between hardcore passages and ethereal moments and emo strumming with zero transition, the song actually hitting hard stops for the switches.  This concept permeates the most distracting moments of the album, where the desire to be different prevents any section from being great.  When you’ve come to expect the open-endedness, though, the songs where the group just commits – ‘Laugh Track for Contemporary Music’ is straight ahead force, and ‘Erf’ might be a typical quiet to loud buildup but it’s the most cohesive and thus, to my ears, best song on the album – then Kill Sadie suddenly becomes a band, and one worth more than a passing listen.  And it’s not always yelly moments: The Quieting / Function of Mouth is a pretty steady, understated affair, and the ambient Untitled Number Three Hundred and Three (perhaps prefiguring MtBs electronic asides) doesn’t sync with the album too well but is certainly interesting.

But, again, in order to appreciate those bits you have to sit through the other ones, where every riff you like or expected burst of sound is cut off or dodged, unfortunately best displayed by the opening and closing tracks, which tend to make or break an impression.

3 stars is pushing it, perhaps, but the title is Experiments in Expectations, and that’s pretty  much what it feels like.  Giving the listen some experimental wiggle room its more interesting, but it’s still definitely not the type of disc you return to too often.