From one extreme to the other – a constant impression left by their droolingly-received debut ‘The Loon’ when it tore out of indie’s blind-spot in 2005 like a dogged bungee-tethered banshee dashing betwixt myriad angular approaches, kamikaze beats and delirious post-Black/Malkmus vocals. And in a way that observation does still apply today, though admittedly not with such positive implications. You see, that was then and this is now – and now those extremes have all but diffused, leaving an altogether more pedestrian reality and making sophomore album ‘Walk It Off’ very much “the other”.
First single from the record, ‘Hang Them All’, didn’t really cut it, seeming with its distorted slap-bass little more than goofy pre-stadia Chilli Peppers. Not the work of forward thinking lo-fi loose canons, certainly. And on first glance the rest of it is a striding expedition away from the frothing-at-the-mouth shakes of original clockwork-Pixies single ‘Insistor’, with no prospect of a return ticket. There is some good news though, and truth to the title, in that with a little legwork there are rewards buried beneath the surface of this confusingly stable follow-up.
‘Demon Apple’ and ‘George Michael’ both resemble peers the Cold War Kids’ woozy blues, the latter with a satisfying descent into distortion catharsis, but not quite to the point where they reassert their own identity at all. Thankfully ‘Le Ruse’, ‘Blunt’ and ‘The Dirty Dirty’, whilst more simplistic in construct than much on their debut, do have a persuasive driving charm, evoking Pavement, Pixies and early Liars respectively, and getting under your skin with determined repetition and understandable melodic singularity. It is what people, before the CD skip button and then MP3 playlist were invented, might have called a grower. But not so much that it pulls a double bluff. Sadly they play it so safe that there isn’t all that much to walk off in the end.