Setting a challenge for themselves, Low Anthem recorded much of this follow up to their great breakthrough record, 2009's Oh My God Charlie Darwin, in an abandoned pasta sauce factory, with decidedly mixed results. The warehouse accoustics forced them, by their own admission, to focus on soft, folky songs that wouldn't drown in echo, or simply sound small in the expanse. "Boeing 737", a stomping 9-11 tale, actually benefits from the confines of the space, heavy reverb lending the song an urgent but far-away quality befitting the subject matter. The better softer songs, like "I'll Take Out Your Ashes", marry evocative lyrics to intricate but unfussy arrangements (in this case, two banjos), while Jocie Adam's clarinet sounds wonderfully ghostly on "Golden Cattle" and "Wire". But the constraints of space don't just shape the record; they also bind it. One problem is that Low Anthem are simply not great accoustic folk composers. Opener "Ghost Woman Blues", a George Carter cover, is most notable for the band's inability to match it in songwriting until halfway through the record. Lead vocalist Ben Knox abandons both his falsetto and his winsome Tom Waits impression, employing an arch hillbilly vocal affect on nearly all the tracks. While this worked fine for a few tracks on Darwin, here it evokes Colin Meloy in its grating relentlessness. And the string of folk ballads, with amost no rock songs to break them up, is monotonous to the point where the details of the arrangements, the reverb, and the fading of sounds in the expanse are just not enough to maintain my interest.
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