- Record Label: Dead Oceans
- Release Date: Aug 3, 2010
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Alternative PressSeattle's Mt. St. Helen's Vietnam Band make a dramatic leap forward on this meditative follow-up to their eponymous 2009 debut. [Sep 2010, p.112]
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Dec 21, 2010Each time the album so overtly flips over, the same brief blushes of goosebumps, the same visceral highs, the same infectious, clapping percussion: I straight up have a crush on this album.
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With its sophomore album, Where The Messengers Meet, the group puts miles between itself and the self-titled debut it released only 18 months ago, and discovers unexpected edge in the process.
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Where The Messengers Meet might be the best MSHVB can do with their current MO, it's a remarkably compact album of emotionally-swollen, disillusioned folk rock -but you get the feeling that the band might be on the precipice of something much more titanic.
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The album doesn't quite knit together seamlessly, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of interesting stuff here. If anything, Where The Messengers Are is an easily measurable improvement over their debut.
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Where The Messengers Meet subverts all the imagery suggested by the group's very name. It implies something incendiary, something rebellious, something explosive. And though there's evidence of a knowledge of all those things in the record's landscape, the path it takes proves a safer one, a trip to be had in good company.
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It seems it will take a third record for it to be fully realised, meaning that 'promising' once again seems like the right word, but on Where The Messengers Meet the Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band do a good deal of delivering too.
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Close-knit is fine, but on Messenger, the band has pulled themselves in too tight.
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Although still fans of start-stop measures and tempo changes, this time around songs are given some welcome room to breathe and the quartet focus on grand, pastoral soundscapes, which loosely recall the likes of Pink Floyd.
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Sad-eyed generalists with a knack for cinematic spookiness, they aspire to Wolf Parade's adventurousness, but often descend into lumbering, Interpol-style self-seriousness.
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The result is a seamless yet stark poeticism that best represents MSHVB's overcast outlook on the world below.
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It's got a lot of good musical ideas, but very few of those ideas seem to come to fruition.
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Under The RadarOnly "Hurrah" has moments reminiscent of the first record, but if the band seems this bored for the better part of 40 minutes, it's hard not to expect a listener to feel the same way. [Summer 2010, p.79]
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Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band wasn't a good record, but its exuberance and overstuffed arrangements at least helped counter its derivativeness. But Messengers drips with resignation and defeat-- the record actually sounds depressed.