Singing duties belong to Rachel Warren, and a press blurb on their official site says "Rachel Warren's singing is simple and tonally pure, with the same mix of velvety sweetness and skyscraping grandeur that makes boys swoon for Jenny Lewis." Leaving aside for the moment my disagreement with the word "skyscraping," this review gives the wrong impression. "Velvety" I suppose must mean "like shouting, but quieter," and I suppose "skyscraping" means "sometimes just shouting." "Tonally pure" sounds like someone was trying to find a nice way to say "boring."
Now I feel like I've corrected too far. Her singing isn't bad, her voice just isn't very distinctive1. However, the rest of the band makes up for that. The arrangements are unusual but never jarring, and the songs are fun, sometimes catchy. The first six tracks are strong and varied, including the song "Our Haunt" included on the aforementioned Misra sampler, and "How to Beat Dementia." There is a fantastic little guitar line in the chorus of "Beats Beat Nothing," that should have been repeated another couple times, but that may be my fascination with echo. The weaker songs that occur here and there on the back half of the record aren't actually bad, they just aren't going to make any mixtapes. Stronger tracks on the back half include "Woah!" and the last song, "Alone."
So where does it fit on a scale that runs from OMC's How Bizzare to the Wrens The Meadowlands? Right about Speakerboxxx. It's a good album, but you can't help but think of The Love Below. Listen to it, enjoy it.
1. I can't help wondering at this point whether this criticism is unfounded. I like relatively few bands with female lead singers, and I am always comparing their singing to that of Kim Deal, which is unfair. There is only one other singer who sounds like Kim Deal, and that is Kelley Deal. When I hear some female singers I am tempted to say "she's trying too hard," or "who told her to sing like that?" and yet here I am criticizing a voice as "not very distinctive.