Review Summary: The Morning After Girls' 2009 album Alone features tremolo-y guitars, airy vocals, and visions of a pristine winter. Enjoy it, because not many others will get to.
As I am writing this review, it is 4 in the morning. Not many people know this, but this is prime The Morning After Girls listening time: the band's undemanding, shoegaze-y sound and ethereal vocal harmonies are a perfect match for my sleepy state of mind (too bad it doesn't overlap with prime reviewing time). Almost all of the band's 2009 album
Alone perfectly illustrates this; the band's overall sound fits perfectly into its own atmospheric niche (that is, one of daydreams and being lost in thought). The little-known psychedelic-rock/shoegaze band aren't exactly the most original group around, but you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who's doing what they do better right now.
After a 30-second introduction that evokes the orchestral habits of post-rock, the album instantly kicks off with "The Best Explanation", which starts with a simple acoustic guitar riff and slowly adds elements that will soon become familiar, such as ethereal vocal harmonies, rich guitars full of tremolo, and ambient drone effects to top it off. Right off the bat, it's pretty easy to see that the magic of The Morning After Girls' music lies not in their songwriting, but rather in their focus on tone and harmony, evoking the work of artists such as My Bloody Valentine or even U2. This is further illustrated on the next track, the uptempo "The General Public", which features more soft vocals and deep guitars, placed in a different environment so that it feels similar but swiftly avoids monotony. And that is what the album does so well: the album as a whole conjures the same wintry image, but the songs never feel same-y, and it's never a boring listen.
Along with "The Best Explanation", standouts include "Part of Your Nature", which, for the most part, is uncharacteristically raw, the first half showcasing a single acoustic guitar and the singular voice of Sacha Lucashenko, the group's main singer. Despite a relative lack of backup, Lucashenko handles the song with more-than-enough fluidity before the song launches into an easily-flowing shoegazer, keeping in line with the rest of the album. Another standout is "There's a Taking", where the band truly produce a wild card: after a psych-rock interlude, vibrating strings and all, Lucashenko and a female vocalist, backed up by almost no instruments, give a repeated fragile refrain ("Hey, there's a taking / Though every time / You're just mistaken") until the strings re-enter and end the song on a beautifully frail note.
It could be accused of the album that it is somewhat homogeneous in structure, but, really, that's what the album is for: the album flows from song to song unnoticeably, yet does it in such an extremely pleasurable way that most listeners won't even care. Of course, that's assuming that
Alone does find its audience, which, in a world where mounds of talented artists are criminally ignored, it could not. However, for those who are curious, give
Alone a try. It just might be your favorite album you couldn't believe you'd never heard of. Just remember to listen to it at 4 in the morning.
