Silversun Pickups -- Carnavas

8/10

Summer of 2007, seven months into marriage, and my new wife and I seem like we're at an impasse. I'm upset with her, and I'm also finding myself and my own voice, which I wish I'd done before we got married, but some times you have to learn on the spot. I'm at our apartment on my lunch break alone, when I come across this Silversun Pickups song.
Nice driving beat, I thought the bass player was cute, and there was this strain of anger that I just vibed on and drank like water. I got back to work at the library a few minutes later (I worked right around the corner), saw we had the band's most recent album, Carnavas, on the shelf, and checked it out. It doesn't feature the above song, "Kissing Families," but it does contain that same strain of anger.
The funny thing is, Carnavas is not an angry album. It's a driving, energetic, sometimes breezy, sometimes slightly aggressive alternative rock album, with a lot of fuzz and spacey guitar effects. Plenty of power chords, and simple lead chords to fill out the sound. The singer has a thin, scratchy, but effective voice, sometimes backed up by some soft female vocals by the bassist.
I listened to Carnavas for the first time in nearly a decade for this review, but my phone (yes...my phone, bluetoothing into my car speakers, has now become my primary music player) kept shuffling the track order. This made the vocalist sound scratchier and thinner, and totally destroyed the album flow. The songs felt incongruous and untethered, the latter as a negative, more like a loose record needle than an unshackled bird. I finally straightened things out, and listened to it again, in correct album order. That subtle running strain of anger I remembered so fondly returned--I'm still married 11 years later, and I'm quite over anything that was going on then, but there's still plenty of things in the world to be angry about.
With everything in order, Silversun's vocalist's weaknesses are minimized by an excellent emotional flow. The album peaks at the end of the seventh track, "Lazy Eye," just like it should. The bridge to that song offers maximum catharsis to the angry strain I've mentioned. The penultimate track, "Three Seed," once again stretches out its legs to bring the album home. "Common Reactor," once again provides a kinetic closer, and epiloguic payoff that fuzzes into eternity in its final minutes, offering both a definite sense of closure, as well as the promise of great things to come.
Of course, there were great things to come in my life after I first listened to Carnavas, and even more pain, as well. However, I never bought or listened to another thing by Silversun Pickups. I don't know why. Carnavas is a swell album. It's greater than the sum of its parts, both a nice snapshot of an era, and a timeless work of alternative rock. Maybe I just want to keep my Silversun Pickups relationship at that.
Also, an aside, this album sounds like what Smashing Pumpkins would have sounded like if Billy Corgan had been on Quaaludes the entire time. Man, Smashing Pumpkins, why are they on my mind? It's as if I'm about to review their entire catalogue in a couple of months.


2006 Dangerbird
1. Melatonin 4:04
2. Well Thought Out Twinkles 4:02
3. Checkered Floor 4:51
4. Little Lover's So Polite 4:58
5. Future Foe Scenarios 5:20
6. Waste It On 4:13
7. Lazy Eye 5:54
8. Rusted Wheel 6:00
9. Dream at Tempo 119 4:51
10. Three Seed 5:40
11. Common Reactor 6:01