version of Nick Drake’s work, with the soft (but versatile) guitar and world-weary vocals of singer Mark Janka. But this is songwriting very much of these times, and not just because there’s a song titled “You Snooze, You Lose.”
Chicago – the band’s point of origin – comes through in that unique sense that there’s always sometime/somewhere else on the mind. “Where the River Meets the Sea” feels like that point in an Illinois March when the cold and snow just won’t leave, and it seems like they never will. And, almost as a prerequisite for any good male band, they nail their “girl name song” with the twangy, small-town charmer “Josephine.” If only “Dawson’s Creek” still aired, the producers would finally have a halfway decent theme song for Josephine “Joey” Potter.
There are drifts into the unfortunate, however. A moratorium on songs about songs is ignored on “This is the Song I Wrote Last Night,” a tired ditty that only opens up the possibility of “I Had Roast Beef For Dinner” for a song title next album. Few bands can expect to walk that tightrope of slow emotional burn/languid depressor for an entire album’s journey.
But soft winds and supportive strings lift up the rest of the album to satisfying heights. The Lesser Birds play The House in DeKalb on Nov. 22, as perfect a match of venue as the band’s name to its style. |
