Chin Up Chin Up
This Harness Can't Ride Anything
This is the second album from Chicago's Chin Up Chin Up and sees them make slight yet important improvements on their previous LP. 2004's brilliantly titled We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers was a great piece of understated indie bliss and The Harness Can't Hide Anything is a similar story only singer Jeremy Bolen has brought his vocals more to the foreground changing his hushed tones to a more raw, unpolished delivery. As a result their sound has become a lot less polite.
From the outset you can feel the sound being more in-focus as the title track gets things off to a good pace with it's driving guitars and fast drumming. Although most of the songs tend to employ a repeated vocal and guitar rhythm as their home straight the sound never becomes repetitive.
I Need A Friend With A Boat is probably the best song on the album. It chimes in with Cure-like guitars and steadily builds to a fantastic crest of driving bass lines, piano and violin. Blankets Like Beavers follows similar suit until half way through spews out a glorious synth drive that takes the song off to new heights of rhyhthmical Spoon territory. Landlocked Lifeguards shows it's teeth a bit more finishing off with a din of screeching guitars and crashing cymbals which sets up the beautiful Stolen Mountains. This is the most delicate song on the album revisiting the hushed vocals of their previous work. It has a gentle, plodding rhythm as its structure but nicely turns into a drum/string medley with a bit of glockenspiel thrown in as well.
The Harness Can't Hide Anything is a similar story to White Whale's WW1 in that it is all really solid but as a result doesn't have any obvious highlights - but also has no low points either. On the final song Trophies For Hire Bolan sums up the album very well when he says, "These lakes are not oceans, these trees are not forests," but in his defense, sometimes the grand, dramatic landscapes which he hints at are not always what is needed and Chin Up Chin Up haven't aimed for that but have produced a quality piece of indie rock, what more could we want?
Links
Tags
22nd Nov 2006 - Tumblr
3