Today the paradigm of music is highly individual. Thanks to perplexing technologies presumably granted to humanity by space aliens, a single person can record an entire album for next to nothing and send singles out to the vast blogosphere, earning international acclaim overnight via wide mp3 distribution, filesharing and courting independent bloggers.
Though the Internet’s advantages for artists are obvious, they come at the expense of immediacy, connection and community. It’s relatively rare for a band to start in the practice space, cut their teeth by playing live and release an album to an eager and dedicated fanbase.
Shake the Baron, three members of Conn’s class of 2010 and one current junior, are a refreshing exception. Ideological holdouts from the college rock culture that defined 90s indie, the quartet spent much of their college years cultivating the sort of scene-centric local love that qualifies them for “Hometown Hero” status.
It shows. Their self-titled debut LP, released in October, feels like a group of musicians comfortable with each other both technically and creatively. The album is consistent and cohesive: they take a few sonic qualities and work them out fully, treating their collective capabilities like a block of marble and chiseling it into a variety of attitudes and feels.
The best tracks live on the basis of atmosphere. On opener “Tree House,” their ear for mood works well, starting with just frontman Andrew Oedel’s vocals and hard-strum guitar part, and then adding instruments and hooks to the established backbone to flesh out a full emotive arc. As far as songcraft goes, they’ve clearly put in the hours.
Elsewhere, the interplay between instruments stands out, such as in “Sinking Sailor” and “Zodiac Name,” where their tight rhythmic coordination makes the best of sparse drumming and sprinkles of reverb-laden guitar. Drummer Matt Addison’s flourishy fills keep things interesting, and the guitar ornamentations show current junior Jon Markson’s capacity for the sort of complex picking popular among contemporaries like Maps & Atlases and Real Estate, as well as eminently present in his main project, the avant-garde hip hop production team Time Crisis.
Competent and polished though the album may be, it doesn’t do much to stand out among the diverse roster of Brooklyn bands with which they now compete. Their overall aesthetic sounds uncomfortably like a catalogue of indie rock clichés. The reverb pedals stay on throughout; Oedel’s singing invokes Band of Horses so clearly as to be distracting. Other touchpoints are equally well-tread territory, with early-Grizzly-Bear guitar parts and rote three-part harmonies doing little to distinguish song from song.
The catchiest material here is probably earworm “I Wish I Said,” but its bloghype single potential is unfortunately truncated by lyrics like, “I was thinking ‘bout the time you crossed my way / and how I didn’t have the courage to say / ‘hey.’” As immediate and engrossing as the hook is, the opening lines are a total face-palm moment.
Apart from some inventive use of Max Currier’s growling oceans of bass in closer “Seafoam Sofa,” the whole album obeys the same structural and dynamic rules, and while it often makes for very pleasant listening, it mostly lacks a crucial element of surprise or inventiveness. There’s promise here, but the band’s future efforts will need to find those moments where they break from their influences and make the most of their excellent musicianship and dedication.
For fans, and that’s a substantial portion of Conn’s campus, the album is a welcome and exquisitely rendered version of the band’s beloved live show. It’d be impossible to spin this record and not feel proud of our fellow Camels’ artistry and craft. They have a whole campus rooting for them, and it’s entirely due to their hard-working ethic and easy-to-dig, catchy indie vibes. (They’re also all super-nice guys… and tall.)
For anyone else, it’s a harder sell. This is Indie Rock: an Introduction. To compete off-campus, they’ll need to work harder to challenge their own framework, either boning up on some more unexpected influences or taking apart their own dynamic and rebuilding it into something fresher with every new song. It’s evident that, for a first time out, this album catches a promising band debuting with confidence, but to deliver on that promise, they’ll have to sacrifice a little confidence for the sake of taking some risks.
On-campus rating: 4/4 Camels
Off-campus rating: 3/4 Camels
