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It’s been four years since the New Year released their last album, The End Is Near, which had seemed to prophetically signal that the Kadane brothers were once more moving on to other projects. But with the north Texas quintet’s sudden return with their eponymous third album, the New Year has not only delivered their best record, but also seemed to have mastered the balance between slow burning, hazy modern malaise and a poignant restlessness that is in continuous search for something bigger, something with meaning. It’s a mellow set, propped up by a backside heavy with piano ballads, even as it courses with an urgency to move and escape. The mood is encapsulated in the mesmerizing build of the opening track, “Folios,” which dances a easy instrumental waltz for nearly 4 minutes before climaxing in the subdued questioning, “I don’t think the good years I’ve got can wait, so what are we staying for?”
That opening line is an appropriate launching point for the entire album, which insularly attempts to reckon the anxiety-fraught stasis of a trapped suburban reality with the pull to run and throw it all away. “The Company I Can Get” sighs in resignation, familiar guitar fuzz braced by the underlying lilt of piano as Matt and Bubba Kadane look out on the deserted night highways: “I need all the company I can get, even that redneck in the red Corvette.” It’s a beautifully mournful song, grasping and desperate. But “X Off Days” follows with more force, a stringent drum beat and harder guitars picking up the frustration, building to the breaking point of the need to leave it all behind even as the vocals drawl with a kind of bed-ridden depression. Likewise, “The Door Opens” is more clipped and jagged, inviting a small town apocalypse with harder, bruising riffs and a rawer vocal punch.
But like their former, seminal shoegaze offerings with Bedhead, the Kadane Brothers are at their best when internalizing their disillusion, letting it linger under the surface of slower, more entrancing moments. The piano lead “MMV” and acoustic “Seven Days and Seven Nights” play like a weary dream, allowing the listener to lull into their own projections of want and need within the musical breaks. The escape may be purely mental, only imagined or fantasized in empty beds or behind office desks, but it’s a universal dream from the bottom looking up, and ultimately does tinge with hope even in its bleakest moments.
While the second half of the album does threaten to collapse under the weight of its slow-dripping depression, it just barely holds its head up against futility. “Wages of Sleep” is almost paralyzing in its ache, and “Body and Soul” yearns to break out of solipsistic misery (“I don’t want a body without a soul, here’s just one more thing, I can’t control”), but “My Neighborhood” goes searching through the midnight hometown streets in recognition of a new perspective, of starting over, even if it doesn’t realize that goal. Facing down the oncoming headlights of a car, the narrator ultimately shifts aside, clinging on tenuously to the possibility of re-creation.
The cacophonous surge of closer “The Idea of You” brings everything full circle – there is no redemption in the New Year, but just the endless pangs of believing in something more, something better, that even their name represents. It’s the fictions we tell ourselves to simply keep moving, a forced looking forward even when there seems no light ahead, and the Kadane brothers manage to still emerge defiant even as they thrust themselves so completely into these moments.
Mp3 from The New Year:
The Company I Can Get
Websites:
www.thenewyear.net
Myspace
