Review Summary: when the weirdos get too comfortable
Extra Life were quite the anomaly. Their sound was avant-garde from the very foundation, yet somehow their dry, clattering rhythms never lost the fluidity of a rock band's. Hell, I'd say they beat quite a few bands, concerning fluidity. They wrote songs based on gallant, spiraling bass harmonies and they wrote eerie, sparser numbers that seemed content to live in the quiet. Their compositions are commonly lengthy and inherently sort of repetitive, but are still prone to quick dramatic shifts - and when this band shifts, they shift hard.
If I were to get a bit more specific about their sound, I'd put the pin somewhere around 'avant-chamber-rock.' 'Chamber' because it's not really 'rock;' you can count on the drums to never land in an even rock rhythm. They're either skittering on the off beats or providing a simple measure of time - full rests between each cymbal slide and all. Past this though, and the band appears like a rock band. Drums, bass, violin, guitar sometimes, and there's Charlie Looker, the darling frontman. Sure, he doesn't exactly sing like a typical rock frontman - he twists at least four notes out of every ending syllable - but that's exactly the place he borrows his striking presence from. The lyrics he sings, intensely personal and purposely bordering on saccharine, deserve some credit for what they add to the surreal atmosphere as well. Once you get acclimated to this setup, it's revealed fairly quickly that the thing this band does, they do incredibly well.
Honestly, it's such a treat to hear music this designed still so focused on rhythm that I feel slightly guilty finding faults with it. But alas, this well-oiled machine had to lose some steam sometime. I feel their second album,
Made Flesh, might have been such a huge progression in sound from their debut that the band found themselves in something of a corner on
Dream Seeds. Made Flesh took
Secular Works' mostly bone-dry and nearly sludge-thick framework and gave it extra pomp, color, and sentiment with bright, flashy synth sounds, a few more direct acoustic approaches, and quicker shifts within songs, spotlighting even more the verse-chorus structures of most of them, as strange as the melodies may be.
Dream Seeds, somewhat surprisingly, doesn't add much new to the Extra Life repertoire, but it does play around pretty thoroughly with the possibilities exposed by
Made Flesh. The production sure took a turn; I can't tell if it was intentional to make the band sound more 'live,' or if it was really just a misinterpretation of their own sound. Unfortunately, it seems to most affect Looker's voice, his once effortless delicacy now sounding rather muffled and worn. But despite that fairly distracting drawback, the music on
Dream Seeds still comes up satisfactory.
More than, of course. The band's longest song is here, 'Blinded Beast,' the closest thing I've heard to 'chamber-doom.' And their second longest as well, 'Ten Year Teardrop,' an amazing work for how its multiple movements swell out of each other so naturally, eventually leading to possibly the band's most 'show-stopping' moment. It's when the speaker of the song is 'breaking down,' and so all sounds but the eeriest flatline are removed, then harsher electronic cracks and clangs seep in as Looker wails,
"I'm breaking down, I can't talk right/How can you smile?/How can you hide from me like this?" 'Righteous Seed' I could see becoming one of the band's defining songs. The beat is deliciously off-kilter and it never lets up or tests your patience, and it's way,
way too catchy for its subject matter: "
The picketer told us/Don't kill your kid/In another world, we didn't/But in this one, we did."
Truth be told, every song here is pretty expertly written and may hit you unexpectedly on any given listen, with the possible exception of the slightly creepy/sappy 'Little One.' It's just that it's hard to see the album as more than assembled scraps. That the two longest songs are the last two songs on the album quite predictably makes for a sagging effect on that half. The other five songs are great, but at this point, it kind of feels like the band is working from templates. The sweetness of 'First Song' beside the crushing heaviness of 'Blinded Beast' looks great on paper, but it only cements further the idea that perhaps this band really only had a few templates to work with from the start. 'Black Hoodie,' from
Made Flesh, was brilliant in the moment because it was the band's first foray into simple pretty folk music. The aesthetic also fit the sentimentality of that song. But now the opener here, 'No Dreams Tonight,' feels a bit like a retread, as I don't see a particular reason why it's required to be an exclusively acoustic thing, of course with those dissonant percussive touches that are, again, kind of trademark at this point.
In a way, it's fascinating that this album came to be what it did. The band's sound was
so designed, so grand and so pristine at first, it's interesting to hear what's essentially their equivalent of 'jamming.' No, they didn't strike gold three times in a row, but that doesn't make what they did achieve any less extraordinary. These guys made some seriously singular music; compositional density coupled with lyrical frankness, sure to confound and possibly move all those who stumble upon it. I suppose, at the end of the day,
Dream Seeds is just Extra Life doing Extra Life. And I like Extra Life.
