Review Summary: More apple pie than I've ever been..
IX
If Rites of Spring were emo’s brawn and Jawbreaker its heart, New York City’s gloomsters The Van Pelt were the genre’s puberty-fevered brain if nothing else. The college band’s debut
Stealing From Our Favorite Thieves came along just as the niche was readying to burst from the underground and into teenage grace. Nervy, peevish and charmingly slapdash, the spoken-word blunderers were one of the many acts that were abandoning punk’s cult of personality for something decidedly more ordinarily pretty. The electric condensation trails of pre-emo granddaddies like Dino Jr. and Superchunk hang all over
Thieves, and though The Van Pelt aren’t quite as comfortable dovetailing into sludgy freak-outs, nor are they nearly as virtuosic, instrumentally they lock into a unit so tight, there’s hardly any unoccupied space to grab hold of throughout the album’s run. Everything they throw up sticks in style. Even Chris Leo’s wispy, breathless, ever-cracking vocals land exactly as they should on a record like this, the pinched rant-shriek of suburban unrest. At least sonically, there’s little to indicate Van Pelt’s NYC roots, as
Thieves has both feet firmly planted in that patented big romantic squall sound of Middle America. Though the band never hit it big or even down the middle, never signed with a major label, bypassing several offers for an indie tag; in ’96, the euphorically bright-eyed WASPish abandon of tunes like “It’s a Suffering” and “You are the Glue” was the prime stuff of mixtapes, slinking in between choice cuts from Pavement, Polvo and Sebadoh to round off the soundtrack to your addled summer. There’s a hushed anxiety coursing through most every second of the record, the sort of middle-class ratcheting that by the mid-90’s had spun itself into a full-blown zeitgeist. Just a year later, The Van Pelt would show that there was loose ambition peeking through their emo veneer, stretching themselves on
Sultans of Sentiment into less combustible and more patient post-rock-like churns.
Stealing From Our Favorite Thievescrackles with the sound of its time, a time capsule long buried, kids who were born to *** around in college, a little lo-fi treasure from a time more simple when trees seemed greener somehow.
