RADAR BROS. - Auditorium

By Simon Howell - A Listening Ear - 01/28/2008

A few months ago I gave my parents a copy of Jim Guthrie's last solo album, 2003's Now, More than Ever, thinking it a perfect compromise between new-school talent and old-school craft sure to please them as much as it had myself. While they didn't hate it, they found its relative singularity of pace and arrangement to err on the side of monotony. I was taken slightly aback, because to my ears, each song had a completely distinct identity. Strangely, I now find myself on the other side of that debate with the Radar Bros.' fifth album, Auditorium -- a curious moniker for a release whose song titles and lyrics nod almost universally to nature. Across its twelve tracks there is very little change in tempo or instrumentation, and Jim Putnam's vocals don't do much to cut through the din. Occasionally, a stray lyric will catch the ear -- "lord of the flies / bright towers in the Southern skies / I keep drinking your tailgate piss / it's you I miss" -- but most hover competently in the songs without much intrusion. It's when they cling a little closer to a single idiom that they flourish. Downcast ballad, "Hills of Stone," marries the layered approach of the rest of the album to a minor-key piano backing to great effect, while "Lake Life" brings to mind departed Modesto greats Grandaddy with its spacey keyboards, lazy pace and sunny chord progression. After those two highlights, though, the album settles back into its aimless trajectory. With its energy levels at a steady low and its songwriting so uniform, Auditorium is an appropriate listen for nights of solemn stasis but too uniform to capture the imagination otherwise.

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