“According to Plan”
from the album Fear is on Our Side
2006
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Indie rock, as practiced by genre heavyweights like Pavement and Pixies, is often marked by a certain artful goofiness, from Stephen Malkmus‘ deliberately ham-handed classic rock revisions to Frank Black’s spastic vocal delivery. In this milieu, songs can simply be collections of broad ironic/iconic gestures; guitar solos are simultaneously hilarious and awesome; lyrics may consist of little more than a series of in-jokes and cheeky allusions. It’s irreverent, indifferently erratic in style, and goes to great measures to show it doesn’t take itself too seriously. I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness belongs to a different genus of indie rock, one that I mentally file as S.I.R., or “Serious Indie Rock.” Exemplified by bands like Interpol, Calla, and, to an extent, grandiose yet traditionally narrative post-rock outfits like Explosions in the Sky, this style of indie eschews irony, pop culture trawling, and genre hopscotch. It’s reverent, recondite, and stylistically consistent.
Fear is on Our Side, ILYBICD’s full-length follow-up to their promising debut EP, has the S.I.R. aesthetic dead to rights. The band’s nominal choices demonstrate a penchant for mannered esotericism. The record cover is black, decorated only with a blue heart/inverted cross logo of ambiguous meaning but massive branding potential. The vocals, even when they become impassioned, are as remote as distant stars. The lyrics are grand in tone but minimal in content; devoid of humor and rhetorical flourish they pass by almost unnoticed in the music’s grey gleam. The guitars shimmer, echo, and press relentlessly upward, but with an elegant museum quality, hermetically sealed in glass cases. The songs are uniformly rigid and linear, resistant to areas of slippage or the happy accident, minutely sculpted until their evocative power becomes almost clinical.
If there’s a sterility to ILYBICD’s music, it’s counterbalanced by the commanding presence with which it imbues the songs, gracing them with the familiar yet persistently stimulating impact of film-trailer voiceovers. You know your emotional state is being deliberately manipulated– of course you do; it’s what you paid for. “The Ghost” slinks along with a precise accumulation of majestic gestures– a chiming guitar dirge and an ominous synth drone, an outsized elastic bassline, emphatically punchy tempo shifts, lugubrious vocals in barely differentiated harmony, long repetitive arcs of concisely ascending chords. “According to Plan” threads silvery filaments of guitar through a goose-stepping fuzz bassline and rigid yet splashy drums. “We Choose Faces” lays a tight, trebly coil of guitar atop a pillowy piano phrase before the rhythm section asserts structural integrity.
An aspect of S.I.R. that I’ve yet to address is its propensity to be most affecting at the moments when it comes unbuttoned, relaxing its rhythmic and stylistic rigor. On Interpol’s debut, this moment came with “NYC”, where Paul Banks’s voice drifted over a strum that was loose and jangly compared to the streamlined contours of the record proper. For ILYBICD, the moment comes with “Today”, graced with all the inspiring incandescence of the Smashing Pumpkins song with which it shares a name, and bringing the Explosions in the Sky comparison above fully into play. Pneumatic percussion respires like a living thing; a stately procession of ringing guitars and expansively woozy synths flows around the prayerful vocals; a mammoth bassline shows up fashionably late and joins the crisply intensifying percussion in flogging the song toward a dazzling crescendo. If the bulk of the album is for the car, the bar, the social occasion, then moments like this are for headphones, bedrooms, intimate and solitary states. The presence of both increases the breadth of this assured LP, and establishes ILYBICD as being no longer a band to watch, but a band to listen to.