Minus Story My Ion Truss

[Jagjaguwar; 2007]

Rating: 2.5/5

Styles: post rock, alternative, progressive rock, anthemic rock, jangle pop, garage
Others: Modest Mouse, Quasi, Arcade Fire, Islands, Helio Sequence, The Microphones, Built to Spill

Minus Story seems a perfect example of a Radiohead by way of Built to Spill outfit constantly teasing the indie kids with their classic rock grandiosity and alienating the rock heads with their scrappy, nasal vocal delivery. They excell at involving prog arias, but they are grounded in sicky-sweet, mediocre singing. My Ion Truss is just the sort of LP that you write up with a good deal of enthusiasm, only to discover that what you like is the approach and not so much the execution. The fuzzy bombast of the crescendos on here can easily make you forget the schmaltzy piano bits that came before. The album can be intense, but its tracks are rife with bad aftertastes.

Not that it's all a put on. I just think BTS as an ELO cover band, no matter how much vivacious intricacy is brought to the picture, is a tedious notion. And that's exactly (minus the occasionally lengthy song runtimes) what we have here. The experience is fun enough in that moody rock anthem sense, but it's working in a compact realm with expressive, varied instrumentation that continually rings hollow. The first track, "In Line," starts things off very promising. It's that muted, washed out kind of opening statement that should usher in something really special (there's definitely an air of Elverum-like doom that dominates any rock and roll fun on offer), but the tracks feel like approximations of rock epics rather than bonafied. The second two tracks, "Aaron" and "Stitch Me Up," have some heroic tumult going at times, but overall they just feel incredibly precedented. "Stitch Me Up," in particular carries the sort of weight in emotion and hooks that makes you want to share it with others, but it's also exactly the kind of post-millennium number that is likely hiding older, better examples of the same thing.

Deerhunter skirts a similar issue, but their vocals -- a maker/breaker for any rock band -- play to pop convention as much as they serve to elevate the overall sound as just another musical instrument. Bradford Cox has his own templatey instincts as a musician, but Cryptograms isn't cluttered with them. My Ion Truss never gives the listener much time to breathe (admittedly, "Parachute" has a really cool instrumental breakdown), cramming in limp pop ideas at every turn and seemingly auditioning for also-ran greatness rather than breaking barriers. Minus Story seems just as good as they oughta be. Better than Coldplay, not as innately singular as Radiohead. This is middling as middling gets, the sort of music that you get a nice boost out of when you hear it live, only to wind up throwing their disc across the room at home when you realize how annoying it all is behind the unabashed stage poise. Maybe what makes Cryptograms more endearing is the lack of ornate stageyness that permeates Truss' 38 minutes. When the amp-smoking cacophony arrives, it feels less cathartic than it does just a relief from all the nude and stately crestfalling.

Minus Story is obviously an incredibly talented group, but I don't hear anything rare enough to recommend My Ion Truss as something exceptional. The comparisons are too many to count, and the hooks are too much on the predictably syrupy side for Minus Story to be anyone's new favorite rock outfit. It's exactly the kind of thing that gets called "awesome" simply because it's full of puffed-up, twisting anthem runs set to stun. There's nothing remotely new in terms of songwriting here, and despite the easy-access pleasure sensors all us guitar rock fans possess, it just might be barely worth a damn when all is said and done this year.

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