An album’s opening track is perhaps its most important. It need not be its best, or even its most interesting, but that first song sets the tone for the album to follow. Folks interested in taking albums front-to-back in one sitting use that opening number as a sort of hero’s introduction, like Rooster Cogburn waking up in back of the Chinese grocer’s or Jeff Lebowski buying heavy cream with a check.
Rare, though, is the record where that first track tells you absolutely everything one needs to know about everything that follows. No further rising action necessary, no side-winding subplots required: just BOOM, here you go, take it as you will.
What September Girls is up to on Cursing the Sea is neither bad nor boring, plenty worthy of anybody’s time. It’s just all there in the first minute and fifty-four seconds, in a song that lends the album its title: a fun guitar line, energetic drums, dreamy vocals, a tonal shift from verse to chorus and back again, and the song choking half-to-death on echo, delay, and metric tons of reverb.
Not all of the songs sound like “Cursing the Sea”, but their genomes are identical. This band of young Irish women found a sound that works for them, and they beat the living shit out of it. In doing so, they deliver a consistent, entertaining record that warrants very near-zero attention paid from the third song through the ninth. More often than it should, the heavy vocal effects prevent one from understanding what anybody’s singing, and in a couple instances the melodies themselves end up obscured beyond recognition. By the time the up-and-at-’em blast off of “Someone New” arrives at track ten, one might be sleeping, or busy doing something else. The greatest song the Bangles never wrote, “Someone New” reveals September Girls’ best self, with energy and flavor wholly absent from the preceding twenty minutes.
Whether it was nerves through the process of crafting a debut or a conscious decision to wash everything in this overwhelming echo, reverb, and delay, the atmospherics so prominent in the mix coalesce too-often into an aural smog blotting out the album’s sun. The driving rhythms and jagged guitars rule, and on occasion some lovely bass runs jump in to steer the ship a while, but without enough purpose powering that omnipresent echo chamber, too many songs end up asphyxiating instead of soaring.
Once September Girls learns to make that Arena Reverb work for them (or maybe ditches it altogether, at the very least for Room), this band will be onto something real nice. Until then, layer upon layer of fog and smoke gets in the way of the tasty morsels of pop loveliness buried underneath. The title track fires a brilliant signal flare that shines on through the second song, “Another Love Song”; later, “Someone New” shows up, ready to get your party started. The only problem is, September Girls hitched these songs to nine others crying out for their own identities, while fighting for their lives.
Rating: 3.5/5