The Republic Tigers

“Buildings and Mountains“
from the album Keep Color
2008
iTunes

Here’s a song with everything going for it: ear-opening atmosphere, engaging melody, interesting/familiar vocals, and then the clincher — a killer, in-through-the-back-door hook in the chorus. From beginning to end, the production is gorgeous; I particularly like how the crisp acoustic guitars are blended into the song’s larger, lusher soundscape, which utilizes a wash of wordless background vocals as its own sort of sonic building block. Listen how that high vocal note promotes an almost Morricone-like sense of uneasy loneliness in the long introduction, as well as in the verse.

And that mood in turn sets up the surprise resolution of the chorus, which begins as a fairly straightforward extension of the musical feeling of the verse, before gliding, seemingly a half-moment too soon, into a previously unsuspected major chord — in the phrase “before our eyes” (1:21 the first time), the major chord unfolds onto the word “eyes” (and the set-up chord, on the word “before,” is lovely too). All in all, what we have here is an excellent argument for the timeless value of knowledgeable production, an argument worth restating in a decade that’s been overflowing with do-it-yourself uploaders and their quixotic belief that people will listen to just about anything. A few people will, no doubt. Many many more people would prefer to listen to something well-crafted, well-performed, and thoughtfully assembled. Don’t you kind of want to know that the band took longer to make the song than it takes for you to listen to it?

Expect to hear a lot from this Kansas City quintet, not least because they are the first band signed to Chop Shop Records, the new Atlantic Records imprint run by Alexandra Patsavas. Patsavas, as music supervisor for The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy (among other shows), can probably take single-handed credit for the emergence of TV as a music-discovery medium. “Buildings and Mountains” was on the band’s debut EP, which was released online in December, and will also be the lead track on the full-length CD, Keep Color, scheduled for release at some as-yet unspecified date in the not-too-distant future.