Western Massachusetts pop outfit Winterpills has long been making excellently lush and bittersweet records. Albums like their eponymous debut and 2007’s Central Chambers are intricate and sweet and long overlooked. If Winterpills has always dealt in a sort of hazy melancholia that’s been around in pop music a long time, it’s always delivered that mood with the band’s own unique angle. This is in no small part thanks to Philip Price and Flora Reed, the voices at the center of these quiet storms. With Echolalia, though, the band takes a new turn. Following another solid record in 2012’s All My Lovely Goners, Winterpills is back with a record of cover songs. These songs are split between the two singers. Price takes the lead on some, Reed on others, and they sing a couple together for good measure.
The resulting record is a pure representation of what a cover record should be. It’s an insight into the band’s influences, and they range wildly, but it’s also a chance for both Price and Reed to celebrate some of their favorite songwriters. Both often sound at home doing just that. The artists covered here range from current artists to classic ones, from the underground to the mainstream. With Price on vocals, the band whips Nick Drake’s “Time of No Reply” up into a gauzy, space-pop gem while Reed turns Mark Mulcahy’s “A World Away From This One” into a new sort of intimacy, shifting Mulcahy’s solitary jangle into a more stately, plaintive folk sound.
The best stuff on Echolalia finds Price, Reed, and the band revealing its influences while still shifting them into a Winterpills’ sound. Songs here become both tributes and spaces for exploration. The way Damien Jurado’s “Museum of Flight” fills out with barroom-rattling guitar but still maintains its bittersweet center is excellent. XTC’s “Train Running Low on Soul Coal” morphs from its angular pop beginnings into shimmering folk-rock. The tracklist, which also includes versions of Buddy Holly and Beatles songs, covers a wide swath of musical genres and sensibilities, and slowly reveals the myriad layers of influence the Winterpills emerged out of.
In exploring these old songs in new ways, there are occasional missteps. The shift into full on dream-pop for a version of Matthew Sweet’s “We’re The Same” feels a bit thin in comparison to the band’s usual knack for layering the organic with synthetic flourishes. Meanwhile, the band’s take on Sharon Van Etten’s excellent “One Day”, opens the record in relatively stripped down fashion. The song sounds sweet enough, but Winterpills are battling against the power of Van Etten’s voice in the original, and it’s tough to match up. And while song choice is a particular strength of Echolalia, the inclusion of Beck’s “The Wolf is on the Hill”, from his Song Reader project, feels like the weakest of the bunch here, and just distracts from the wonderful closing take on the Beatles’ “Cry Baby Cry”.
The album is, overall, a solid exploration of how the Winterpills developed a sound, how varied a band’s influences can be, and a nice celebration of a group’s favorite songs. It’s also, at its core, an album with plenty of strong performances to go around. It might not quite hold up to Winterpills’ other albums, but it acts as an interesting and compelling companion piece, and gives us another angle from which to view the band’s always solid, wildly underrated work.