5 out of 5

Label: Merge

Producer: Jim Putnam (Engineer)

The critics and I are always engaging in fisticuffs over certain bands’ best albums.  For real, all the time I’m like ‘fisticuffs?  again?’ and then we square off in a game of speed chess.  I don’t think I have any purposeful predilection toward subverting popular opinion…  I mean, I’m generally surprised by when I find that crappy sequel to be better than the original, or the major label album to have more merit than the classic indie one, and then further surprised when I can’t dig up reviews to justify that opinion.  (To my own blog, then!  Self justification is a lonely road.)

The kids and their critical parents loved ‘…And the Surrounding Mountains,’ and then have given every other Radar Bros. album a pretty mundane review.  I think Mountains is a great album, but also the most samey-sounding of the Bros’ catalogue… there was something about it being the first Merge release that seemed, perhaps subconsciously, to encourage the band to mix the album with that multi-instrumental wash that a lot of Merge stuff gets, making it easily identifiable as onea’ them Pet Sounds-comparable albums that older people with glasses can shmooze about while mentioning something they heard on NPR.  It was also a more thematically subdued record to me, the ol’ Putnam creepiness hanging around in the background but not sneaking up on you the same way it had previously.  And it was lacking in the dusty shambly ramble that their previous albums used.  But to its benefit, Mountains was also one of the most consistent RB albums.  Subsequent releases would have higher peaks, but would dip into a more habitual sound for tracks.

Now through all of this blabber – and through the bands lineage – there has been progress.  I’ll totally cop to the concept that its relative progress, and the kind of nuance that will only be important / notable to fans of the band, but calling every Radar Bros. album the same is not true.  Putnam and his crew have added and subtracted elements, getting closer and closer to some ultimate joyfully depressing sound.  And I feel they achieved it on Auditorium.  Their albums normally open with a winning track, and that’s again the case here, but what sets it apart is how every track feels different.  It’s all in the Radar Bros. vein, for sure, but this is the first record where I remember track names, and when a piece of a song gets stuck in my head, I don’t have to flip through each track to figure out what which it is.  This uptick in definition carries through to the lyrics – often Putnam sounds half in a dream in his singing, which has always been part of the heroin appeal of the group’s style, but it’s like he’s peeking above the clouds with ideas intact on Auditorium – images come across fully formed despite the surrealism, and the odd swear word or vile line always cap the emotions he’s driving at.

So I realize this was more about other albums besides Auditorium, but the point is that Radar Bros. really earned this record.  Years of plying this trade have yielded an amazing record that’s everything we love about the band… plus an extra detail here or there to make it sound just right.