The Starlight Mints cover a lot of musical ground on their latest album “Drowaton,” released Tuesday by Barsuk Records, but they might have spread themselves too thin.
The band obviously had fun making its third album. The disc is high-spirited in its bouncy melodies and quirky detours.
Think Pavement dressed in Sergeant Pepper uniforms with a bored guy hired to make random percussion clicks and dings during the recording sessions. Sound like a mess? It kind of is.
Almost every instrument imaginable makes a cameo on the CD. Bold brass blazes alongside confident string arrangements. Guitars drift with the piano, but they are consistently interrupted by zany sound effects. It sounds a lot like an old-time circus orchestra, if it had access to a synthesizer and an electric guitar.
Each song seems to have a life of its own.
Tracks one and two are responsible for setting the mood of the album. “Pumpkin” does a lot of bouncing with singer Allan Vest investing about three minutes honing his falsetto to a backdrop of chunky, distorted guitar and something of a funky marching band. “Torts,” the second song, is reminiscent of late Pavement in all its weirdness as Vest channels Stephen Malkmus’ nasally staccato style.
Third in line is the only standout track, “What’s Inside of Me?” The song is the only moment on the album that resembles the best track “Pages” from their last album “Built on Squares,” released in 2003. With “What’s Inside of Me?” the Mints finally tone down the weirdness factor and focus on good old-fashioned piano rock – and thank goodness. The song feels much more cohesive and less ambitious than the rest of the album.
For most of the album, the band tries to accomplish too much with their songs, which give the disc a disjointed structure expected from an intentionally-surreal band like Ween. The Mints visit a big band sound over here, vacation with ’60s pop over there and constantly flirt with indie rock behind our backs.
Songs like “Seventeen Devils” will surprise listeners. From the first half minute, the song sounds like a flop of dark Arabic-style strings – keep listening and you get a pleasant Bowie-esque tune with a catchy chorus. The second part sounds nothing like the first part. Much of the album falls into the same trap, with the good parts hidden among the bad. In the end, such drastic movements within songs will turn listeners off.
The album requires a degree of patience to get past the awkward instrumental interlude “Rhino Stomp” and through the second half of the album. Even “Killer,” the inoffensive Neil Young-ish acoustic ballad doesn’t do the trick.
To say the album stinks wouldn’t do the Mints justice. These guys have plenty of talent. It’s just that to appreciate the constant style-shifting within and between tracks, listeners have to be expecting distracted quirk rather than cohesive structure.
