Review Summary: A sunny fall afternoon.
When a critic describes an album as “pleasant”, it’s (often correctly) read as a sort of damning with faint praise. Bird Streets’ self-titled debut album is pleasant in the best way possible. Frontman John Brodeur’s voice has a certain friendly, unassuming smoothness to it reminiscent of power-pop stalwarts like Alex Chilton or Rivers Cuomo. His vocal presence makes the album’s immaculate songcraft seem deceptively everymannish, the sort of thing you might hear a scruffy twenty-something playing in a coffee shop. Except, y’know, actually good.
Opener “Carry Me” kicks things off in superb fashion, with warm, steady bass and chiming guitars washing over a playful, lilting groove. This sunny instrumental both complements and contrasts Brodeur’s lyric, which uses a car crash as a metaphor for a more inner sort of turmoil, but casts everything in an optimistic light, looking forward to a future full of possibilities and answers. More than anything, “Carry Me”- and the album as a whole- is nice. Not saccharine, not wishy-washy, just
nice, in a way that rock music rarely bothers to be.
Crucial to
Bird Street’s success are the instrumental contributions of the one and only Mr. Jason Falkner. While Bird Streets is primarily Broedur’s brainchild, Falkner infuses the entire album with the color and texture that makes songs like “Betting on the Sun” and “Heal” really stand out, using jaunty piano accents and guitar fills to give them just a hint of the glam-rock bravado he brought to his work with Jellyfish in the early 90s. He also produces the album rather handily, leaving enough rough edges to make the whole affair sound natural and lived-in while keeping everything crisp and clear.
Of course, at the end of the day, pleasantness can only get you so far. Brodeur and Falkner push few boundaries here, placing themselves a long way from anything too cutting-edge or innovative. At 45 minutes long, the album isn’t entirely airtight either. One could judiciously trim 5-10 minutes from it without losing too much of value. And though the songwriting is interesting enough to prevent blandness, Bird Streets’ sonic palette is fairly static throughout; listeners more attuned to overall sonic aesthetic than moment-to-moment songwriting might find themselves getting bored halfway through.
There’s a reason “pleasant” is seen as a backhanded compliment when used to describe art. It implies the work is competent but unspecial, too mild-mannered or inconspicuous to be considered a true masterpiece. And that’s not entirely untrue.
Bird Streets will not end up on any “Best of the 2010s” list, and it won’t become a cornerstone of a new musical movement because it’s so entrenched in established genres. But as, well, great as greatness can be, sometimes all an album needs to be is good. And I'll be damned if this album isn't good.
