Can you make out this album’s cover? Squint if you have to. It shows William Schaff’s 1996 painting Dead Family, a fucking creepy work of art depicting a weeping woman clutching a dead child, probably her own. Like much of Schaff’s work of that era, Dead Family deals explicitly with themes of loss, grotesqueness, portraiture, and familial bonds, all tied up with subtle but unmistakable-if-you-know-to-look-for-it Holocaust imagery. It’s a powerful painting, partially because it has a visceral impact (like I said, fucking creepy), but mostly because it’s so thematically rich.
Somewhere, somehow, some member of Rockford, Illinois band the Braves copped a peek at this painting and liked it enough to make it the first image most folks will ever associate with the group’s music. Between the use of this painting and the album’s big-think title, Love & Mercy, it’s tempting to think the Braves’ music will be commensurately thematic and deep. It’s not — in fact, the nine songs are virtually content-free, choosing to evoke scenes rather than explore themes in their lyrics. And that’s cool, I suppose; we need good escapist music, even if only to assure our good socially conscious music slams home that much harder. But this just ain’t good escapist music: it’s pretty standard merely pretty jangle-“pop” à la early R.E.M., not without its superficial charms (handsome-voiced singer, for example), but nothing to write a letter to the editor about either.
Lead vocalist and Wurlitzer-ist Joseph Reina has a mild case of Michael Stipe-esque mumbles, but on the rare occasions when the words come through he’s exposed as blandly romantic at best, fetishizing scenarios that would never occur on this Earth. “Meet me at the river”, goes the chorus to one song (do real people really meet at rivers?), but mostly the words are barely there, so vague that I now believe they might be simply language for tone’s sake — and hyper-romanticism is the tone. Blech.
Plenty of good rock albums get by with meaningless and slightly unsavory lyrics. If the music is strong, who cares, right? Like I mentioned before, the Braves make jangly-“pop” (in quotes to indicate it’s theoretical pop — pop as a pro forma genre exercise containing none of the virtues of actual pop). But the range of musical territory Love & Mercy encompasses is so narrow, all of the songs start to sound the same. By track six you’ll be experiencing your first déjà vu pang, and it only gets worse from then out.
There are two guitarists in this band, not that it’s obvious; neither one does anything terribly interesting (aside from a twenty-second outbreak of destructo guitar during the last twenty or so seconds of “I Am Just a Fog”, and even that is subtle!). After countless close listenings to this album, I am unable to whistle, hum, sing, or belch any riffs from Love & Mercy, because there aren’t any. Inexcusable for an album purportedly influenced by the “melodic, jangly rock” of “REM, The Posies, and Catherine Wheel” (sez the press release).
All that said — well, maybe you’ve noticed the 5/10 rating, denoting this is an “average” album. That it is. As background noise, it’s fine: one long song, narrow emotional/musical range, slightly evocative (if in an overly wimpy and romantic way). But to people like you and me, music is more than background noise, right? Someone should tell the Braves that it’s okay to say things and display your personalities through your music. And that meaning needn’t be confined to your album’s cover art.