Review Summary: The House on Sesame Street
During the late 90's and early 2000's, now-legendary outfits like Glassjaw, Drive Like Jehu, and At The Drive-In were brutally carving out their post-hardcore niche in the musical landscape. Their powerfully unpolished yet accessible sound shocked and awed, spawning the next generation of imitators who were bent on rehashing the same tried and true ideas, with each successive effort hitting less effectively. Today's breed of generic post-hardcore is a mere shadow of what the genre greats used to play, with the emotional substance and value of a birthday card from a distant relative that you never see. But exceptions exist, and A Lot Like Birds is ostensibly the new torch-bearer of a stagnated genre.
No Place is A Lot Like Birds at its most experimental so far. The band still retains its trademark chilling post-rock-esque buildups and bridges, utilizing a range of haunting effects to achieve a dense, layered sound that channels their darker concept clearly. Each crescendo is struck home by gradually louder reverberating guitars and the increasing tension of harsh vocalist Cory Lockwood's voice, while bassist Michael Littlefield adds depth and Joe Arrington grounds the high-soaring guitars with his ridiculously technical drumming. While each individual song may stand well enough on its own, the album is really meant to be taken together as a single organic entity, as shown by single "Kuroi Ledge", which sounds much better in the context of the rest of the album. This will lead to understandable criticism; individual songs no longer stand out as they did on Conversation Piece, and the lack of solid song structure does not help. The more ambient-geared instrumental performances of guitarists Michael Franzino and Ben Wiacek also add to a sense of homogeneity. However, once the listener gets past the initial chaos, the end result is more than satisfactory, and first impressions will be shattered as individual parts start standing out from the wall of atmospheric and beautiful noise. No Place comes in as scatterbrained but emerges as more intricate, calculated, and cohesive than Conversation Piece.
The vocal tag team of Cory Lockwood and Kurt Travis performs admirably, as expected; Kurt's haunting falsetto contrasts neatly with Cory's mesmerizing spoken word passages and grating, tension-producing screams. While in typical post-hardcore clean vocalists and harsh vocalists are staunchly separate entities, the A Lot Like Birds vocalists seamlessly intertwine and trade off, forming a very powerful vocal dynamic that is rarely executed as well as it is on here. Additionally, the lyrics themselves deserve a honorable mention as they are perhaps some of the most intelligent, well-written, and emotionally charged lyrics in the entire post-hardcore genre. Cory and Kurt are lyrical juggernauts; their work ties the album together and meshes perfectly with the concept of the album.
A Lot Like Birds certainly has a very curious discography indeed; after releasing a beautiful but sample-riddled post-rock-esque debut, the band underwent a tightening of their roster and made a notable shift to experimental post-hardcore. With No Place, A Lot Like Birds has expanded their sound; it is something they never have done before, and goes to show that the band is able to mature. In the context of the expansive post-hardcore landscape, the pure, uncondensed energy of earlier acts has been internalized and directed towards the entity known as the "self" in an introspective torrent. In the house featured on the album art by Bradley F. Edwards, all things diseased, depressed, and dark have found a place to call home.
