Slight Fountain occupies a dubious middle ground. It's a pop album that leans heavily on the kind of queasy, off-kilter melodies and unpredictable chord progressions championed by David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, but it arranges those elements into a collection of songs infinitely more accessible than anything off The Getty Address or Rise Above. While I have a lot of respect for Longstreth and the madman stuff he does with melody, the group doesn't -- at the risk of unironically echoing Stephen Colbert -- speak to my gut. In a way, the (comparatively) straightforward nature of singer/songwriter Yianni Kourmadas's compositions exacerbates my feeling of disconnection with his take on DP's aesthetic. He, in essence, appropriates a style of music I already find emotionally alienating and further strips away much of its headiness and complexity. He does what Longstreth does, only not quite as well.
This is not to say that there aren't interesting things happening from song to song. Take “Snowflake Heart” as an example. It opens with the halting thump of the bass drum, pounding in time with an awkward progression of acoustic guitar chords and a staccato vocal harmony in falsetto. Then, all the backing elements drop away at the verse, leaving Kourmadas to sing over a bare-bones guitar accompaniment. Following the chorus, the guitar is joined by the bass and drum, with the addition of a ringing trumpet. It's as pure an example of Hermit Thrush's ambitious song dynamics as I could hope to find.
Unfortunately, the pleasures gained from such excursions feel largely academic. This is due, in no small part, to Kourmadas's total non-presence as a singer. He offers a breathy, muttered vocal performance reminiscent of Mount Eerie's Phil Elverum, if Elverum didn't really give a shit about what he was singing. The lyrics themselves don't do much to help the situation. On the page, they read like especially cryptic haiku. Yet for all of their mysteriousness, the songs conjure little in the way of evocative or memorable imagery.
For as many risks as Hermit Thrushes take, I can't help but walk away from Slight Fountain thinking that I've heard it before. Maybe the band would be better off exploring more conventional melodies. The most vital-sounding and memorable track on the album for me is “Ceci,” a song that relies less on peculiar sounds or jarring melodic shifts and more on instrumental interplay and subtle changes in tempo. It sounds almost like a late-90s Built to Spill composition condensed to its most essential elements. This song, at least, sounds like a song and not merely an intellectual exercise. And if “Ceci” is less ambitious than the rest of Slight Fountain, consider this: the song is no more derivative than anything else Hermit Thrushes have to offer this time around.
1. An Oil Fruit
2. Snowflake Heart
3. Ceci
4. Push
5. Golden Wounds
6. Broken Adze
7. Song from Boat
8. Black Cat
9. Older Trees
10. Headless
11. Found House
12. Goosneck
13. Pearla
14. A Good Dream
More about: Hermit Thrushes
