2 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft Records

Produced by: Point Line Plane

Damn, Point Line Plane were some crazy ass mofos… and then they panicked over their tea leaves (or some smoke signals, perhaps), grabbed another synth player, and kinda played it normal for their sophomore album. Normal is very relative of course, given Joshua Blanchard’s off-key yelps – somewhere between Make Up crooning and Brainiac howls, but with less tunefulness than either – and the album’s moderately sweeping scope of 70s prog, 80s dance, and 90s post-punk, but nonetheless, if you set aside the affectations, this is a much more predictable affair than PLP’s debut.

Which I kinda respect, and I get / appreciate the redirect. It’s hard to continually execute in the spasming indie noise space of the band’s first album, and while I’m sure there were more songs to be written in that vein, the utter energy of their output to get there suggests, to me, a preference for the band to feel like they were always working / writing on the edge of something, and not just playing to their scene. So to peel back and morph their percussion-pummeling, keyboard skronk punk into groove, coated in some of the aforementioned swirls of fuzzy prog jamz and 80s club beats – somewhat giving in to the dance punk scene they’d swerved around, but undermining it by casting it into the past instead of the future – well, again, I get it.

Unfortunately, this lumps the majority of Smoke Signals into some of the kitsch that was only at the edges of their first release, and ends up putting more focus on / allows more focus on the lyrics, which are kinda baseline paranoia; that’s as off as calling the music ‘normal,’ but just to suggest that the one-liners that are spouted aren’t moving mountains, and are echoes of plenty of other “society is scary”ism you’ve heard elsewhere.

The rating itself is admittedly relative: I think without the scope of their preceding release, this album is good. It’s still very unsurprising, with Howard Gillam’s addition on keys not wholly taken advantage of or not mixed in in such a way to really change the game, and even the production rather undermining some of the potential by playing up the beats over the rough edges. But the tunes are catchy enough. However, stacked next to the other release – while I recognize the bind the band might’ve found themselves in of not wanting to repeat things – I find myself checking out once the melody drops on the opening title track, when you can tell this is going to be a much more reined in affair.