Demob Happy

“What will it take to make you listen?”

8.5/10

Some of my favourite albums of the last couple of years have come from a strand of impressionistic folk that roughly began with the release of Grizzly Bear’s ghostly ‘Yellow House‘ in 2006 and Iron & Wine’s kaleidoscopic ‘Shepherd’s Dog‘ a year later, gathering pace in 2008 with fine albums by Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver. By citing such albums I realise I’m making myself seem very on-message, allying myself with the critical consensus, but it seems that the much of most successful fusions of songwriting and sonic inventiveness belong to recent mutations of American Alt-country and folk. Department of Eagles are closely associated with Grizzly Bear, sharing a common member in Dan Rossen and with further members of that band providing added colour and texture to the exceptional ‘In Ear Park‘.

If you have come to ‘In Ear Park’ via the Department of Eagles’ first album, ‘The Cold Nose‘, and not via Grizzly Bear, you may be shocked by the direction their sophomore release takes. This is because ‘In Ear Park’ shares much with Rossen’s other band: the spectral folk, the bucolic otherness, the manipulated woodwind and acoustic textures. As an admirer of ‘The Cold Nose’ I am happy to report that not all its stylings have been abandoned - their are echoes here of ‘The Piano In The Bathtub’ and ‘Ghost in Summer Clothes’, for instance - but gone are the pro-tooled breakbeats, Radiohead-isms and wigged-out collegiate hip hop, for starters. The samples, a defining factor of the debut’s laptop cut and paste aesthetic, have not gone completely, but are used in subtler ways, adding texture in such a manner as to be often difficult to distinguish from ‘real’ instrumentation.

While sonically ‘In Ear Park’ is closest to ‘Yellow House’, its songwriting marries Syd Barret whimsy with Paul McCartney-cum-Randy Newman-esque ballads. The opener and title track segues fluidly from skeletal folk, ragtime banjo, into something vast and orchestral and back, from the fragile to the psychedelic. Here, and elsewhere on the album, principle duo Daniel Rossen and Fred Nicolaus sprinkle their arrangements with a kind of Disney stardust (and I’m talking Fantasia here, not the Lion King) that recalls a less widescreen Deserter’s Song-era Mercury Rev. While the harmonies are pure Hollywood, it’s Golden Age Hollywood, and thus rather haunted, spectral.

‘No-One Does it Like You’ - which surfaced as a rough draft on MySpace some time before the album’s release - bobs along on a Wall of Sound-reverb and barbershop doo-ops. Mystical, magical, brilliant pop, both tender and grandiose, it suggests DoE as would-be candidates for a future Bond theme - they could certainly do as good a job as the heavily-touted Amy Winehouse and Mark Ronson. One of the album highlights, its blend of Phil Spector, Motown and psych pop is brilliantly revisited on ‘Teenagers’. The vocals opening ‘Phantom Other’ are pure Paul McCartney, the track starting as a lilting acoustic ballad and building over cut up harmonic fragments: a brilliant synthesis of subtle electronics and folk - a relative of Hood’s pastoral post-rock. “What will it take to make you listen?”, he implores - and I feel like crying out in response, ‘I’m listenting !’. It climaxes with a thunderous, cavernous finale, redolent of ‘Yellow House’’s more cacophonous moments. ‘Around the Bay’ is chillier, darker - skeletal folk embellished with huffing percussion, woodwinds and film score samples - while the intense and ominous ‘Waves of Rye’ is almost angry. While the second half of the album is more meandering, occasionally ponderous, it is still a triumph - perfectly dark and dream-like for these winter months.