The Morning After Girls – Alone

“Wait, that was two songs?” – my initial reaction to learning that I was already somewhere on the third track of The Morning After Girls’ album, Alone.  Not a good first impression to say the least.  Sure enough, the low-key psych rock trio’s first two songs had passed on by without as much as a nudge to my conscious.  Granted, “A New Silence” is a thirty-second introductory track with little more than a few strings reverberating as the preface to “The Best Explanation,” but even the first “real” track does little more than moan along at a lethargic distance.

So when “The General Public” introduced a loose structure, I jolted awake for the album’s first trace of discernable words and distinct chords.  Don’t rely on the band to keep you awake from here though.  My shock was short lived even in the initially catchy ambience of the accompanying chorus.  At about the half way mark the band stews in what they already have, dragging out half-hearted hooks with their whispering vocals to a point of continuous sameness.  Call it continuity, but Alone has way too much of it.  It’s the same issue that until recently plagued …And They Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead, with ambition getting confused with roomy, self defeating instrumentals.

Don’t get me wrong, songs like “Part Of Your Nature” and its finger snapping acoustic core satisfy during initial passages, but then linger repetitively.  The worst offender, “There’s A Taking,” even finds the audacity to open with an electric stringline that builds to a puzzling near-ten seconds of light humming smack at the heart if the song.  I’m all for artists exploring their creative talents and challenging conventions, but by the middle of Alone, the group fails to raise a pulse.

Alone can be reduced to two choice cuts: the title track and “Death Procession.”  Both progress without long periods of saturation, and even with the crashing crescendo demonstrate authority – particularly in the lead guitar.  But the remainder of the album crushes The Morning After Girls under the weight of their lofty ambitions.  Maybe I could stomach these guys as an EP, but an hour is an overdose.