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The stylistic shifts Monster Movie has gone through in the past five years have been profound, as the dark dream-pop of their earliest days has turned up the pop a notch or two, while rarely sacrificing the “dark.” The band’s Claire Records debut and subsequent 2002 split CD with Dreamend on Graveface were both, if one wants to draw a somewhat facile comparison, fairly Slowdive-ish. But it’d be more accurate to liken Monster Movie’s earliest output to Heaven or Las Vegas-era Cocteau Twins – not so much in sound as in spirit. With songs like “Beautiful Artic Star” and “Nobody Sees” off the split being nothing short of trance-inducing, Savill’s vocals so drenched with effects and reverberation they make your stomach drop, hitting you right in the guts, maybe right next to the place where Elizabeth Fraser’s do when she’s warbling out the “Cherry-Coloured Funk.” But 2004’s To The Moon switches things up a great deal, effectively responding with a negative to the question “Does he sound like that when he talks, with all the reverb and whatnot?” The two tracks from the split are reworked with a bit of the vocal effects stripped off, to reveal Savill’s voice as lush and passionate without all the fuzz obfuscating it, nearly Morrissey-esque in its throatiness. Though “Sweet Lemonade,” To The Moon’s superlative opener, is the hallmark of the band’s potential, skillfully navigating pure indie-pop bliss in a way that most newer acts tend to miss out on entirely. Transistor, as a followup, explores more brooding territory than that traversed throughout To The Moon. Beginning with a darkly expressive manifesto, “The Collapse” whispers in a broken electronic voice, “this is Transistor, this is the sound of our souls,” before leaping into 40 some seconds of the kind of cinematic piano you might expect out of, well, Mojave 3. But if there’s a hint of that unique UK fascination with ingratiating a country twang into melancholy pop that Mojave tends to embrace so wholeheartedly, it plays second or third fiddle to the soft ethereal blare of the music and the simmeringly sad voice of guest vocalist Rachel Staggs. Though fuzzed-out drones don’t necessarily dominate the disc, the icy lament of “Chances Are High” shows Monster Movie as melancholy as ever, driven by understated, chiming guitars instead of blaring ones. “Letting You Know” manages to magically merge ringing pop with resonating drone, creating something vaguely evocative of Jesus and Mary Chain softened to a wistful lullaby. Perhaps
the one largely lamentable fact about Transistor is that Savill’s
vocals remain underused, and don’t seem to reach the heights
they did on To The Moon material. Granted, there’s only so
much you can fit into seven tracks, but Savill’s voice at
its least unassuming would complement Staggs’s gut-wrenching
minimalism. Make no mistake, though, Transistor functions well as
a mini-album, with the shorter, less perceptible tracks bridging
gaps between seriously moving pop tunes. The sounds of Monster Movies’
souls continue, with Transistor, to be beautiful and tear-jerking
ones.—Matthew Stern |
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