Mojave 3 - Spoon and Rafter
(4AD)
Mojave 3 have long labored under the shadow of Slowdive, as the one rose from the detritus of the other, which is entirely unfair as the things that each respective band works to accomplish are not really all that comparable. Where Slowdive sat squarely in the shoegazer category, appropriately blissed out and all, Mojave 3, as their namesake desert suggests, has sought the sunbleached, arid landscape of folk-rock. Where the former was distinctly European, the latter is particularly American. Where Slowdive looked inward and forward, especially on their masterpiece Pygmalion (you can have Souvlaki, if you take exception to that), Mojave 3 has looked outwards and backwards in their musical inspirations. Finally, where Slowdive just got better and better with each successive album, Mojave 3 seemed to have peaked with their first album, the sad and beautiful Ask Me Tomorrow.
It had seemed that Mojave 3 was a conscious reaction against Slowdive. Songs were stripped to their basic melodic elements and present in classical (as in classic pop) form. It is unsurprising that such an exercise would quickly grow stale. Just when we had written them off as producing pleasant-enough, mid-tempo, low-key love songs that seemed to be beamed through some sort of AM radio time warp (after all, how spectacular can such songs be?), along comes Spoon and Rafter, the first proper follow up to Ask Me Tomorrow.
The big change has been to allow some of that old Slowdive atmosphere back into the mix. Right from the beginning, on the epic album opener "Bluebird of Happiness," this is immediately apparent. Between the notes of a lone piano, there is buzzing, chirping, and a sweet steel guitar. The electronics are understated and unobstrusive, providing texture for the space, and are slowly layered, creating a complex collage from a simple line repeated again and again. As if this were not delightful enough, they continue with "Starlight No 1", a jaunty Belle and Sebastian-esque melody carried by acoustic guitar, which is flushed out with a theremin and analog synths, and, at the song's climax, a distant distorted squall. Not every song follows this pattern, and overall they are actually a bit hit and miss, but the hits are profoundly striking, and the misses are still pretty OK.
Beyond the details, however, there is something less tangible, yet likely more significant: a renewed sense of vigor. Though the music is hardly vigorous in terms of rocking and rolling, there is a palpable enthusiasm in the music that was absent from their last couple of albums. Ultimately, this is what Mojave 3 has most needed. Having proved their mettle as songwriters, honed their craft in regard to the nuts and bolts mechanics of musical construction (in Slowdive, the lack thereof was frequently covered up by reliance upon the crutches of volume, technology, etc), the group seems confident enough to allow the songs out of the narrow confines retro-adult contemporary. Certainly no one is going to mistake this for Slowdive, but that old magic is back.
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