2 out of 5

Label: Suicide Squeeze

Produced by: Sun Breaks

Both members of Sun Breaks – John Atkins and James van Leuven – have seemed to follow similar career trajectories, bouncing around in the Seattle indie scene of the late 90s / early 00s with if-you-know-you-know credibility, and semi-regular outputs. Then relative silence. …Then Sun Breaks. And I’m surely trivializing even more than normal, here, but there’s something to that post-scenester return that is rather dictating SB’s sound, filtering Atkins’ shambling pop and van Leuven’s Automaton Adventure Series into something that teeter-totters between flashes of inspiration and triteness, as the duo dusted off some cobwebs on the preceding EP, and then watered things down for this full length of song sketches. Those sketches definitely reach some heights where John’s 764-Hero melodies and eager vocals well supported by meaty drums and dashes of reverbed synths, but its material that runs very thin, and errs toward electro-pop lite, like at least a decade after that was already wearing thin (aka pretty soon after it happened). Ultimately, this sounds like two elder Seattle statesemen settling into a groove where they’re surely enjoying themselves, but producing material that’s closer to practice space quality. Due to their histories, that’s not unenjoyable, but if you arrive with a bias for their previous material – or for other stuff on Suicide Squeeze, or even for the preceding EP – the relative weightlessness of the music makes it a tough sell.