The good news is that Weathervanes, the debut album by Freelance Whales, will win you over pretty quickly if you’re a fan of pleasant pastiches of standard indie pop technique. There’s a little Postal Service- or Grandaddy-esque digitized romanticism, some breathy vocals spiked with banjo that’d bring tears to Sufjan Stevens’ eyes, and a bit of fun.-sounding fun. The bad news is that there’s always the danger of unoriginality when unabashedly drawing on your influences, as Headlights could tell you. There needs to be a signature, a something that establishes the presence of the band that you’re listening to, something more than just the recycled influences of the bands they listen to. Fortunately for us, there’s no lack of innovative instrumental interplay on what could easily have been just another early-‘00s-fuzzy-keyboard-pop-trend rehash.
It’s hard to say whether this group is at their best when chanting along in hazy harmony, as in the album opener “Generator ^ First Floor”, or when carving out sharp melodies, as in the following few tracks. Luckily, we have the whole album to try to figure it out. Somewhere along the way we’ll hopefully pinpoint that signature sound, but I’m warning you: it won’t be easy.
What is easy is listening to Weathervanes. In fact, easy is one way to define the sound of Freelance Whales. Don’t conflate easy with simple, though. “Generator ^ First Floor” positively reverberates with what the language of whales might sound like. All I know is I’ve never wanted to sing along so badly with what should, by all rights, be a really irritating noise, and that’s some impressive sonic alchemy.
The next tracks showcase the other side of Freelance Whales' sound. “Hannah” is the first of four consecutive pop gems that run the gamut from goofball twee back to the dreampop of the album opener. Its lyrics are composed of stream of consciousness non sequiturs from the Beck and They Might Be Giants schools of song writing. It’s filled with delightfully constructed but seemingly unconnected and oddly assembled phrases, and I could not for the life of me tell you what the song is about. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. “Location” is more in line with the opener, relying on the give and take of the pulsating bass and the marching percussion that flows emphatically into the chorus and dissolves away again. It’s all too easy to overuse an instrument like the banjo, but the Whales don’t lean too heavily on it, using it as on this track mainly to underscore the melody. There’s a palpable sense of artistry throughout the album largely due to this kind of tasteful restraint. This sort of thoughtful instrumentation can also be found on “Channels”, “Danse Flat”, and “Vessels”. These one to two minute instrumental tracks don’t stand up well outside of the context of Weathervanes, but they do wonders for the tone and overall flow of the album.
The Freelance Whales have their signature sound in the seemingly combative concepts of atmospheric dream haze and whimsical banjo pop that combine with what they’ve drawn from their antecedents into a uniquely satisfying listen. The only track that fails outright to sound like anything more than one or another of the aforementioned influences is “Broken Horse”. From the banjo accented acoustic guitar riff awash with haunting background noises and vocals to the repetition of “God is moving in your bloodstream,” it could almost have been lifted straight from a Sufjan EP. Even in this track, though, there is that connecting thread, that essence that permeates each track, binding this album together without ever becoming formulaic. In a digital age of filesharing and infinite playlists, it’s always nice to see a band that still cares about the art of the long-player.
Track List:
1.Generator ^ First Floor (3:06)
2.Hannah (3:37)
3.Location (4:37)
4.Channels (1:17)
5.Starring (3:33)
6.Kilojoules (3:19)
7.Broken Horse (4:37)
8.Danse Flat (1:14)
9.Ghosting (5:18)
10.We Could Be Friends (4:12)
11.Vessels (1:41)
12.Generator ^ Second Floor (4:30)
13.The Great Estates (4:01)
