2 out of 5

Label: Guilt Ridden Pop

Produced by: John Goodmanson

‘Recently Okay’ is just dripping with 90s alt-rock crunch.  Not that that’s a bad thing – that era did produce a lot of quality acts who mixed grunge with some indie rock elements, and honestly, any single track on ‘Recently’ makes you think you’re listening to a pretty epic, understated experience.  Your new favorite band?  So the next song plays, and then you’re wondering if maybe you’re still listening to the same song?  Ten minutes pass.  You tune out.  A familiar guitar line brings you back in step.  Oh, the album must be repeating, and this is a great track.

Yes, you’ve put my carefully laid out clues together: Dwindle doesn’t have much variation, both song to song and within a song.  The group really only has two levels: clean guitar ditty and distorted guitar ditty; whoever sings (instruments are credited but not vocals) has a pleasant Campfire Girls-esque tone but doesn’t seem to have the training to push his croon to match the guitar squeal when needed, meaning we’re also stuck to essentially one pitch for the singing.  That’s not to say there wasn’t the possibility of more, with tracks like ‘Coming of Age’ and ‘Deadbeat Dad’ using the two levels to actually do a build and release instead of just tuning on the distortion and playing the same verse-chorus-verse rock out again, and on closer ‘Measure for Dying,’ the group successfully figures out how to actually make more noise with their guitar / bass / drums setup.  All of this is given a tuneful, rich sheen by producer John Goodmanson, and, as mentioned, if you jump to any song with a clean aural palate, you’ll be over-joyed by the Seattle sound of swaying rifts and shoegaze vocals.  But… I have to be fair and except that a disc divided into 8 tracks that are meant to be different but essentially sound the same can’t be rated on the strength of that one good sound.