Tenement Halls Knitting Needles and Bicycle Bells

...seem to begin in the middle, as if you walked into the room long after someone pressed play. Disconcerting, isn't it? That's how Knitting Needles and Bicycle Bells feels. Dispensing with the formalities of building to climaxes, Tenement Halls usually just launches right in, increasing the urgency but sacrificing dynamics. Throw in a limited singer wailing at the top of his range for 44 minutes and you are left with a set locked into permanent overdrive but lacking the killer material needed to pull it off.

The songs aren't bad, actually. Hooks abound and it's clear that frontman Chris Lopez is trying his damndest to get them across. But the best material seems culled from other songs. Charlemagne rips its opening chord figure directly from the Beatles' I'll Be On My Way. Marry Me actually borrows a melody line from When I Need Love. That's right, Leo Sayer. What's more, the sound amounts to little more than variations on the digital reverb setting, with the result coming across like the bastard child of Mott the Hoople and the Arcade Fire. Several songs suffer from an intolerable mix, such as Starless Nights, with an overbearing organ drowning out the vocals. And as if this weren't enough, the playing is sometimes unforgivably sloppy. I just wrote a review praising the inspired looseness of Love as Laughter on their new one, but Knitting is so loose it frequently comes undone. It sounds like good musicians doing a rush job, kind of like Blood on the Tracks without the spellbinding genius. It comes across as either timidity, which has no place in rock; indifference, to which I say if you don't care, why should I; or contempt, which, while the best option artistically speaking, isn't really a winner either.

That's the bad news. The good news is that the best songs, like As Long As It Takes and even the derivative Charlemagne, are delivered with considerable aplomb. The highlights ameliorate the weaknesses to a certain extent and there are enough good moments to make it worth the purchase. But I can't help the feeling that Lopez's rather obvious talents have yet to be fully tapped and focused. I'd like to hear what he could do by dropping the Spector/Glam/Rockablurry Wall of Sound and engaging us a little more directly.