Review Summary: The Laughing Chimes’ ode to ghost towns is an early contender for the year’s best.
Around the same time last year, I listened to the Umbrellas' new album, Fairweather Friend. Don’t worry, I don’t expect anyone reading this to have heard that album (even though you should). It was a sophomore record by a jangle pop band, released by Slumberland Records, that was an improvement on the band’s first album in basically every department. Better songwriting, better hooks, better everything.
I bring this up because it’s almost exactly one year later, and another Slumberland band has reappeared after 4 years with their follow-up. Time truly is a flat circle.
The Laughing Chimes were a band I discovered on one of my many sleepless nights trawling through Bandcamp’s new releases tab. And while I liked their stuff well enough, it wasn’t anything that drastically different from the slew of new jangle acts that were cropping up around that time. That’s not a slight against the band; their debut and two EPs had their share of decent cuts. But at the risk of sounding like a snob, I listen to a lot of new jangle pop. It takes a lot to make my ears perk up these days. Paradoxically, I’m also not that hard to please, either. If you’ve got a good hook and some pep in your step, I’ll probably like it. And The Laughing Chimes’ new record, Whispers in the Speech Machine, is full of good hooks. Sorry, I meant great... no, amazingly great hooks. Where so many new C86-inspired acts fail, in my speculative opinion, is that they’re so focused on being faithful to the sound that they forget the reason these older acts found an audience to begin with. They were pop! They took the best elements of 60s, 70s, and 80s music and distilled it into a concentrate that somehow came out both rough and refined. Few bands in the modern day hit this note (either going too far in one direction or another), but the Laughing Chimes nail it here. After only a few listens, I cannot get songs like “A Promise to Keep” and “High Beams” out of my head.
This is their first full-length with a full band, and they are killing it here. I appreciate the fact that this project started as a duo, but this dreamy jangle sound they’ve adopted here benefits so much from the extra members. Folk rocker “Atrophy” would not work without the interlocking of those echoing vocals, the interplay of the guitar and bass, the synthy goth keys, and the kicking drums. According to them, the record was inspired by the urban decay of their hometown, and kudos to the band, they capture that eerie, fog-covered landscape with aplomb here. As well as the duality of both loving where you grew up and dreaming of escape.
There are many bands of influence I could list here, but I’ll save it. All you need to know is that if you even passingly like 80s jangle pop, this almost assuredly should be on your checklist. The Laughing Chimes have upped their game with this newest outing, standing out from the crowd with some prime jangle pop. And I hope this is a sign of things to come, because I’m definitely keeping my ear to the ground to see what they have in store next.