“Nightwatch”
from the album Lives and Treasure
2011
iTunes
Acrylics are a modern band from Brooklyn that often sound like an old band from Anytown, U.S.A. They basically play soft-rock — not the stylish brand of Phoenix, the psychedelic kind of Gayngs, the hazy Washed Out type, or the sly and subtle version favored by Destroyer. No, this is the broad and eclectic sort of soft-rock that might fall under the tastefully patterned umbrella of “adult-contemporary,” a radio format mostly defined by what it isn’t: punk, metal, hard rock, rap, and so on. It’s played on rock-based instruments with a strong vocal presence, a keen ear for arrangement and texture, and a knack for homogenized exotica. Otherwise, it lacks defining characteristics, meaning an aura of rebellion or the dominant influence of any single subculture.
Molly Shea and Jason Klauber are the duo at the heart of Acrylics, though they expand to a quintet live. Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor produced and released their 2009 EP, All of the Fire. They move to the Hot Sands label for debut LP Lives and Treasure, which showcases a sound malleable enough to assimilate new wave, country, lite-funk, art-pop, and more. “Sparrow Song” is an ingenuous ode to Kate Bush’s spacey electronic pop. The chilly disco-rock of “Nightwatch” has a sultry, hooky vocal that recalls Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” Shades of Sinead O’Connor, Fleetwood Mac, Natalie Merchant, and American Music Club loom large. But traces of modern big-tent indie can be found as well. “The Window,” with its woolly vocals and webbed acoustic arpeggios, splits the difference between Bright Eyes and Elliot Smith, while “Asian Pear” develops from dreamy beginnings into a lean tremolo-guitar anthem with the barking grandeur of Wolf Parade.
Acrylics avoid fashionable chaos. Their interest is in getting a guitar’s delay interval or flanger profile just right; in dropping the fill in the perfect spot. There are only a few mild solos, and more often, the guitar lays back as a glinting under-texture for big synths and voices. Shea is the better singer, with ironclad pitch and an interesting tang in her voice. Klauber’s singing is a homelier mumble, though it grows on you. When their voices come together, things really click. The lyrics tend toward extremes, either abstrusely mystical (hers) or blurry and out-of-the-way (his). Shea flirts with something satirically new-agey at times, and between her soaring over the “planets and skies and fields of a future time” and Klauber’s earthier ruminations, the emotional and conceptual centers feel vague.
The best songs — “Counting Sheep,” “Molly’s Vertigo,” and “Asian Pear” — feature strong structural definition and crisp, surprising dynamic shifts. A handful of genre-based set pieces fare less well, like the wordy, meandering folk of “It’s Cool Here.” Dylanesque isn’t the right look for Acrylics, who are better at carefully pruned exteriors than core songs. But even here, there are striking details to admire: Eerily diminished chords and harmonies drift like alien breezes through the slow, sentimental tune. Lacking what we call “edge” or any hint of outsider pretension, Lives and Treasure is not, by and large, designed to stir great passions — it’s soothing, controlled, and slightly superficial. The exceptions– “Asian Pear” is a song with something on the line — reinforce the rule. While the taste level occasionally falters, this is a fine and detail-oriented album that should be taken with a grain of salt by fans for whom music must always, at some level, be a site of iconoclasm.