This is about an album called Time to Echolocate by a band called the Ebb and Flow, whose promotional literature characterizes them ad nauseum as disciples of 1970s prog-rock, a genre based upon the kind of obsessive unfolding practiced most famously by Rube Goldberg and most recently by the Fiery Furnaces. Both Goldberg and the Furnaces can meander; they can repeat themselves too often, or too stridently; they can even, at times, become ridiculous.
Time to Echolocate is eight tracks and fifty-seven minutes long. It is loose but never meandering; long but never repetitive; inventive but never ridiculous. At its best it sounds like a three-piece band applying the simplistic instrumentation of 4/4 rock-and-roll—guitar, bass, drums, the always indispensable Farfisa organ—to the giddy enormities of the new Rock Collective. The songs are big, messy, and ambitious, but expansionist flourishes are rare; even the ghostly preamble of album-opening suite “Sonorous” quickly gives way to staccato guitars and vocalist Roshy Kheshti’s straightforward curtain-raising: “Every day somebody goes away.” Much less colossal, “See You in the Fjords” is skeletal guitar pop, a brief, affecting burglary-as-love vignette; and Sam Tsitrin’s immensely appealing voice isn’t that of someone who has marbles in his mouth, but rather that of someone worried that he might.
It’s Tsitrin’s precipitous enunciation that makes “Country Verses,” the arguable highlight. It’s not the subtle and believable country twang given the guitar, and it’s not the ironic bite of the lyrics (”I have a message from God and it says you should love me / Because I am the best atheist in the West”)—it’s the way Tsitrin, contrary to all established speech patterns, and completely unnecessarily, mispronounces “atheist,” and it’s the way he and Kheshti da-da-da in messy harmony, as if they happened to have the same idea at the same time. It’s the best example of the Ebb and Flow’s compromise between pop’s Swiss watch and prog’s Goldberg machine—and though the resulting piece of mutant craftsmanship doesn’t shake its debt to either template, it inherits the better qualities of both.
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