Plumbiferous Media

Cana­dian indie-rock band Land of Talk released its sec­ond stu­dio album since its for­ma­tion in 2006 this past Tues­day. An extra­or­di­nar­ily typ­i­cal indie-rock album, not much else is truly extra­or­di­nary about Cloak and Cipher. That’s not to say that the album is bad by any strech of the imag­i­na­tion. For an exceed­ingly generic album, Cloak and Cipher is exceed­ingly good. It is very much a plea­sure to lis­ten to, just not much more than that.

Front­woman Eliz­a­beth Pow­ell pro­vides lead vocals for Cloak and Cipher. Through the album, Pow­ell demon­strates a vari­ety of vocal styles, some more suc­cess­ful than oth­ers. The more suc­cess­ful styles do a good job at demon­strat­ing Powell’s vocal skills as well as the fluid sound of her voice, while the less suc­cess­ful include styles such as the inter­mit­tent slightly muted, artif­i­cally tinny sound of sec­tions like the begin­ning of “Cloak and Cipher.” The album does for­tu­nately tend towards the for­mer styles - but there are enough moments like the lat­ter to dis­tract from those more often than they should.

Lyri­cally, Cloak and Cipher ranges as much as it does vocally. Switch­ing between poetic lines like “Light­ning and snow / Cracks and sliv­ers / Burned in a row” and less cre­ative lines such as “You can drive in and drive back / Pull the past behind you,” Cloak and Cipher man­ages to stay gen­er­ally inter­est­ing with­out ever seem­ing to tell a uni­fied story. Instead, the album relies heav­ily on the imagery of each lone track. This is met with var­i­ous lev­els of suc­cess, but it’s gen­er­ally true that Land of Talk has done a good job match­ing lyrics to sound, even if the lyrics aren’t always engrossing.

Cloak and Cipher is not just an indie-rock album. Cloak and Cipher screams indie-rock album. Of course, that means it has all of those advan­tages and flaws inher­ent in such albums, and it dis­plays them read­ily. The chords are inter­est­ing, but the struc­ture often lacks vari­a­tion. The album is dense and simul­ta­ne­ously well punc­tu­ated by per­cus­sion, but there’s not all that much vari­a­tion between tracks in orches­tra­tion. And, of course, Cloak and Cipher is just the right amount of catchy, but you can tell right from the start that the album could eas­ily grow exceed­ingly dull.

That pre­dic­tion does, at least to some extent, come true. Or rather, while the album may not be exceed­ingly dull, it’s not an album that requires much atten­tion, nor an album that demands much atten­tion, nor an album that really draws much atten­tion. Of course, in a way, that works out per­fectly, but then again it does mean the album really can’t be all that good. The album always sounds decent, but not much more than decent. Cre­ativ­ity is more or less lim­ited to track titles (like “Blangee Blee”), and some­times lyrics as well, and the over­all result is an album that really does sound good but really doesn’t do any­thing with its sound.

Cloak and Cipher is cer­tainly not a per­fect album, and, due to a num­ber of flaws, it really isn’t an excel­lent album either. It is, how­ever, an inter­est­ing album. With Cloak and Cipher, Land of Talk has done enough things right to cre­ate an album that is at least some­what worth lis­ten­ing to - but not quite enough things right to make it exceptional.

This post is tagged 60-69, Land of Talk