2 out of 5

Label: Flameshovel

Producer: Charles Cooper

Well, the Thom Yorke comparisons dissipate after track one, the title track, gets going and lead singer Craig Klein stops crooning and switches to talk-singing, at which point we can trade that for some Radar Bros. comparisons, then for Indie Bleeps and Bloops comparisons a la producer Charles Cooper’s Telefon Tel Aviv, then, finally, and most damningly, by track 4’s ‘Rose’, ‘If You Can’s mid-album ‘loud’ track, The Race starts to sound like any given pretty/dreamy/boring it band.  The intentions are there – that opener, once it finds its pace, makes good use of layered sound to come to a pretty wonderful climax, and the following two tracks – ‘Safe and Sound,’ ‘Can Get Home’ – follow similar suits with slight enough variations in pace to keep it lively.  But ‘Rose’ was the tipping point for me.  A nature / water theme emerges with the lyrics, along with cementing the notion that each track pretty much drops the title within a few words and then repeats some fairly lame rhymes over and over.  Some of this seems amusingly amateur – ‘If You Can’s lines have no real punctuation, their focus at the start of any given verse, lending a rhyming word a truly perfunctory feel – but after a few songs of this, it starts to rub like the high school poetry it is, especially ‘The Hours Eat the Flowers,’ with the opening gem ‘April showers lose their power / with each passing hour.’  There are worse lyrics out there, but we’re tossing the singing very much to the forefront and thus there’s the impression that we should be affected by these things.

Anyhow: ‘Rose’.  A verse is sung, then we get some brasher production and distortion for a few bars.  Quiet albums will often successfully make use of a singular noisy moment or track, but there’s no sense of buildup with ‘Rose’.  You know the shift is coming, and when it goes into its second verse, the song doesn’t vary in pitch or effect one bit.

‘Sinking Feeling’ has a nice swoon to it, and next to last track ‘Seed’ has a nice organic, drone sound to it that makes the mundane lyrics and general dour tone more appealing…  ‘If You Can’ has good ideas but seems mishandled under an electronic gloss that sameifies everything.  In general, when the disc lays back, it can wander into some effective and soothing moments; unfortunately, there seems to be a hope – from the way lead singer Klein’s by-the-books croon and his sappy lyrical content are presented – to make this into more than what it is, making its flaws and sound-alike nature all the more apparent.