It's New To Me: Doing the Distance by Snowglobe (2004)

Sketch titled "Tower of Babel" by Erich Kettelhut as part of the conceptual art for Fritz Lang's Metropolis, 1924

For several years, I've had Snowglobe filed away as a band to look into when I get a hankering for Elephant-6 style baroque-psych revival. Snowglobe are from Memphis, and Doing the Distance did hit the spot when i picked it up last week - it's just the kind of kitchen-sink pop that I was looking for. They're a weird band, though, and not always in a good way. The band has two songwriters who split up the album and take turns on lead vocals. Tim Regan is a traditional classic-rock singer (very AOR radio) in a way that reminds me unpleasantly of 3 Doors Down or Train. His lyrics are also pretty generic, but his songs have excellent dynamics and guitar sounds. He also includes some nice piano parts. The other writer, Brad Postlethwaite, is definitely more "indie", right down to his weedy strained vocals and surreal lyrics. His songs are more emotionally engaging and often feature nice horn parts, but his songs come across as even more "twee" by being nestled in between the generic "rawk" of Regan's songs. (One of Regan's songs on Doing the Distance is even called "Rock Song".)

Overall, though, Doing the Distance plays to the band's strengths, toning down the stark contrasts by running the songs together with weird interludes and crossfades. At first, I didn't understand why people compare this band to Neutral Milk Hotel, and then "Ms June" started. At the one-minute mark of the song, Postlethwaite goes into a full-blown Mangum impression, and a trumpet chorus rises up out of nowhere. And then he starts paraphrasing Neutral Milk Hotel lyrics, referring to "that beautiful dream [that] flashed on a screen," and a "voice soft and sweet ... rolling and ringing". I was surprised that Snowglobe would write such an obvious paean to their hero, but I was even more surprised that it didn't irritate me. That may be a good way of describing Doing the Distance, in fact - "surprisingly not irritating". More than that, though, it suffers from no lack of interesting ideas and makes for a fun trip back to the heyday of the Elephant 6 scene.

"Ms June" by Snowglobe