2. My Favorite Reverb (2014)

Last summer I, as a broke college student, had to work some ‘bullshit’ job between semesters. I won’t get into the details, but essentially every day I get out of work at 10 PM and had to drive through the quiet, boring suburbs I had moved back into for the summer. Its at this point I decided to finally listen to My Favorite Reverb. Arguably the perfect time to fully appreciate a post-rock/shoegaze album, in tired reflection, staring out at the empty streets of a ‘bullshit’ suburbia harshing my 20s angst. Unfortunately, even in that perfect time and place, I couldn’t bring myself to like this album.

It’s one of those follow-up albums you pretend to like at first, bobbing your head and trying to pretend you’re getting lost in it, before finally succumbing and realizing it wasn’t all that good. We all know that feeling , cough Wolf Parade cough, and it never ceases to disappoint you. This album, just isn’t what I wanted from Lemon’s Chair at all. The structures of these songs seem almost lazy, whereas the structures of songs in I Hate? I Hope were arguably my favorite part of the record. Take a song like “Wahrheit”, sure the tempo changes, the melody changes, and even the general mix changes, but the whole song just chugs along in this single mood, and each section just manages to become a new way of achieving that exact same feeling. The entire album starts to feel tonally monotonous as one song of boring build and release, or absent-minded drifting comes one after another.

The tones, and individual structures are fine enough, I love the very odd, altered drum machine that introduces “Luna”, and the kind of strange, reversed and chopped guitar leads that happen throughout, but once again, it just goes… nowhere. It refuses to develop and seems to just meander along without purpose and direction.

What I will note is that this whole album isn’t wasted, because the last two tracks are fucking great, and were exactly what I wanted more of from the band. The track “#9″ has an almost Bedhead structure to it, slowly decaying as the lead vocalist starts to wane out, and the guitar becomes sparser before finally fizzing out in what sounds like actual analog tape being chewed up. It’s patient, letting its crash run a full seven minutes long, proof that simple structuring and direction makes these songs so much more powerful and vibrant. “My Favorite“, the final track, is a much more conventional post-rock track, building from a slow, moody start to a huge, crashing finale that strains the ears. But the passionate playing, the very deliberate flow, and the weird atonal reverb that underpins the monstrous finale, it’s all there to create something powerful, utilizing that simple structure. I’m always sad to see a band I love put out an album like this, but tracks like #9 and My Favorite Reverb make me hopeful for an even better follow-up.