Anything that is attached to Nick Zammuto’s band will arouse at least some comparison to The Books, the avant-pop project in which he was one half of until the band’s split in 2010. The Books made music that combined the intimacy of bedroom folk instrumentation and the endless world beyond said bedroom that only plunderphonics could provide. Nick Zammuto’s first album after The Books, aptly named Zammuto, represented a wild departure from plunderphonics. Zammuto’s vocoder drowned songs, the drumming of Sean Dixon and tracks like “Weird Ceiling” and “F U C-3PO” that revealed an underlying knack for progressive rock tendencies. In retrospect, Zammuto feels like the product of a musician finally enthralled with what instruments can do.
Anchor, Zammuto’s second album, is an even bigger curveball than its predecessor. This isn’t the prog album that was hinted at by Zammuto, but a pop album that sounds just a tiny bit left of center. If anything, this album signifies the completion of a transition period that saw Nick Zammuto start as a weird music auteur and ending as a great songwriter with above average pop sensibilities.
At its most brilliant moments, Anchor shows Nick Zammuto moonlighting as The Postal Service. Tracks like “Need Some Sun” and “Hegemony” see him channeling Dntel’s wintery, synth-laden production and Ben Gibbard’s intimate vocal style and forging an album that is substantially less satisfying than Gibbard and Dntel’s superb one off. Like Zammuto, filler winds up holding Anchor back from being a masterwork.
While Anchor’s particular brand of indie pop is a good idea, and a fairly out-of-left-field one to come from Nick Zammuto, it is an album that would have been stronger had he cut it without his full band. Where the band was a novel addition on Zammuto, they feel intrusive this time around. The result is a handful of well-written pop tunes sounding like they have been put through some post-Phoenix school of synthpop. It’s easily the safest album that Nick Zammuto has put out.
Still, Anchor presents a fresh idea that could be further hashed out on future releases. If this is a direction that Zammuto continues in, they could benefit by finding a way to make their sound more conducive to their rhythm section without subduing the rhythm section. Sean Dixon switching over from the drum kit to drum pads on a few tracks like “Electric Ant” is a productive solution to this conundrum. Even then, Anchor doesn’t do a great job at convincing that Zammuto have an entire album’s worth of great pop songs in them.
Beyond a handful of humdrum tunes, Anchor is made a tad unsatisfying by an underlying sense that Nick Zammuto is still trying to escape The Books. Yet if history suggests anything, the best way to accomplish that is to make a great album or forge a commercially successful solo career. The wealth of great ideas set forth by Zammuto’s first two albums suggests that they could accomplish the former, despite how scatterbrained their sound is. Perhaps Nick Zammuto and Co. can harness these ideas into a stellar album, but they strive more than they succeed on Anchor.
Rating: 3/5