What’s coolest here, though, are the bit-parts: the use of the pedal steel, which The Shallots (I don’t care if they don’t want to do the right thing and rename the band, I’m doing it for them) don’t hear as a seventies-country-rock artifact (yawwwwnnnnnnnnnnnnnn) but as an expressive added-color element capable of serving both as claustrophobia-inducing foil for liberating fuzz-guitar (in the the wonderful “Ballad of Douglas Chin,” which is not a ballad) and third-eye-opening siren. Or take the reduced role of keyboards: in similar bands to The Shell Hunters (why not? search also: the Scrum Toes, the Scale Owners, the Shale Floes, and the Shall (Be Brought) Lows, though only if they turn electronica and/or get influenced by Wire in a big hurry), where there’s a guy who really knows his way around a keyboard, the mood in the studio usually runs toward the we’ve-got-it, let’s-use-it side of things. The Sure-Luv-Them-Hos, though, have the gift of patience, and so they ease up on the keyboard until it really means something, as it does when it rises and clarifies matters toward the end of “The Perfect Map,” a drone-pop number that takes the best instincts of Bedhead, the Sea and Cake, and the already-named but worth-naming-again Low, then artfully, quietly mixes in their own playful, unpretentious personality. |
