Pedro the Lion - Control
(Jade Tree)
Control is Pedro the Lion's third proper full length, and their second straight up concept album. Few can write songs as heartbreaking as David Bazan. His songs generally hover around moralistic stories or a broken relationship of some sort. 2000s Winners Never Quit showed he was able to extend the breadth of his message from a single song to a whole album, with wide shifts and changes to accent the different aspects of his message. With this approach, he began to dabble in louder dynamics and occasionally "rocked out" on a few songs.
These parts were timed perfectly with the lyrics and were logical and cohesive.
Control has many more of the rock songs, and simple songs with understated dynamics are pretty much tossed out the window, which doesn't work very well. The power in Pedro the Lion's songs has always had a lot to do with how they're delivered—understated. The story he's telling on this album is of a marriage torn apart by adultery, ending with the wife killing the husband. Lyrically, the album flows well with one exception, "Progress" (a different version was released last year on an EP of the same name) doesn't completely make sense in the middle of the album, but it's not difficult to draw at least some relevance from some of the lines. David seems to have felt that this song's message (in short: technological progress is in fact a step backward) wasn't told with enough authority on last year's EP. So, he re-recorded it using that vocal effect made oh-so-popular by Cher, thereby completely ruining a great song with technology. Which is funny, but not if you have to hear it right in the middle of an album.
Songs like the opener, "Options," "Magazine," "Second Best," and "Priests and Paramedics" don't disappoint a long time Pedro the Lion fan like myself who has been spoiled so much by the quality of past releases that choosing favorite songs is very difficult. But, unusually, there are a few that fall flat, such as (of course) the treated "Progress," "Rehearsal," "Rapture," and "Penetration." There is something I like in every song, but some of them just don't work as a whole.
This sort of deflates the effect of the album's theme, as it stumbles through the tracks. But, as it reaches the apex of the story where the wife finds out that her husband is cheating on her, and she kills him, the songs ("Second Best" and "Priests and Paramedics") match the needed intensity and melancholy and nearly carry the strength of the whole story on their own.
In the Pedro the Lion discography, this will fall near the bottom because it's a little hit and miss (however it's still far better than the Whole EP). However the fact that some of the songs on the album are among Pedro the Lion's best (specifically the "Across the Universe" reminiscent "Priests and Paramedics"—easily the best song David's written), will probably keep this album in my stereo pretty regularly.
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