3 out of 5

Label: Lava (unreleased), VX Records

Producer: Jacknife Lee

This goes in the Sardy file ’cause he mixed it.  AND I THINK IT SHOWS.  OR… hears.  So: punky for VOLCOM, and then John Goodmanson helped them out to hone a beautiful yelly album, also for VOLCOM.  Then, maybe, during the emo yelly years at major labels, Vaux netted itself a deal with Atlantic via Lava and sat down with Jacknife Lee to make a more ‘mature’ album.  The producer switch is understandable in expanding their musical palette – Lee (i.e. GARRET) had been with arena rockers U2, soft poppers Snow Patrol, and blitz poppers The Hives, so he covers a lot of bases and Vaux fleshes things out with keyboards and blip and bloop manipulations and drum machines and Quentin Smith goes for a Radiohead croon in between shredding his vocals.  The plus side is that this does result in some truly awesome tracks – ‘Identity Theft’ and ‘Cocaine James’ are fever-pitched rockers that followup on their Plague Music EP in terms of energy and pummeling cohesion, and dismiss doubts that they switch-ups may have diluted the band’s effect, while ‘Need to Get By’ and ‘The Rope, The Pistol, The Candlestick’ use space and some basic lyrical metaphors (‘Rope’ being, I assume – if’n the title isn’t a hint – influenced by Clue) to flip-flop to quiet build territory, bringing in those extra audio diddlings without at all crowding the air.  However, something is missing.  Firstly, that plain jane drumbeat and guitar mash on track 2, ‘Are You With Me?’  What’s going on there?  Oh, right, Chris Lord-Alge mixed it to radio airplay safeness, and there’s our single.  Secondly, when he’s not keeping it simple, Quentin’s lyrics are rather sophomoric, using silly words and cheesy comparisons to illustrate generic pictures of… I dunno, relationships, cynicism.  What’s missing is the giant ‘fuck off’ feel that ‘There Must Be’ brought to the table on each and every track.  When you tune in to hear what’s being sung, it feels uninspired, and so perhaps – besides the label woes of Lava dropping the band (or Vaux backing out?) and leaving the release in limbo – perhaps lack of motivation ended up being the dissolution of the group after this album.  Even on the punky rocker ‘Burn the Bandwagon’ the ‘popular music sucks’ tirade feels like a retread of some of ‘Must Be’s themes, and seeing as how this was, on some levels, the Bandwagon album, it’s a little stuffy.  Jacknife’s production also may have affected the songwriting (hand in hand with the band, I mean, in their attempts to maybe apply his expertise) in the sense that it rarely bristles.  The opening tracks do the trick, but then the riffs only come in splashes elsewhere, and the drums have lost all their stomp.  Sardy’s mixing saves some of, thankfully, fuzzing it up at appropriate moments and bringing the low end in.

So it’s a mixed bag.  On one hand, coming into this fresh, this is harsh music.  Vaux pushed the barrier of soaring anthemic rock with some ear-splitting noise, and it would’ve been interesting to see them get their actual due.  On the other hand, approaching it from the band’s previous release, it feels a bit shizo, with the desire to take the music in different directions struggling against a need to be tough yelly guys.