Plumbiferous Media

Some­one Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, formed in Mis­souri at the end of Yeltsin’s pres­i­dency, returned to album pro­duc­tion this past Tues­day with the release of Let It Sway. Signed to Polyvinyl, it’s not sur­pris­ing that SSLYBY’s new album is extremely well recorded, but what is sur­pris­ing is the album’s con­tent. Let It Sway is a mod­er­ate depar­ture from the sound of Broom and Per­sh­ing, both of which are hard to remem­ber any­thing but fondly, and, sim­ply put, Let It Sway is a great success.

Front­man Philip Dickey once again lends his dis­tinc­tive voice to Let It Sway, which helps the album in retain­ing much of the style of the band’s ear­lier work - though with new devel­op­ments and cre­ative changes that make it com­pletely new. Dickey’s voice is, as always, simul­ta­ne­ously breathy and plain­tive, while filled with an energy that is too often lack­ing in the occa­sion­ally semi-lethargic singers who fit that pro­file. As such, Dickey fully embraces Let It Sway’s energy, for a quite sat­is­fy­ing effect.

The aim of SSLYBY’s lyrics has always seemed to be the com­bi­na­tion of well-written sto­ries and odes with just enough absur­dity to keep it all inter­est­ing. Let It Sway stays in much that same vein, and it cer­tainly ful­fills the goal of being inter­est­ing. Dickey hap­pily bounces between singing “All hail Drac­ula!” and the some­what less clear (but no less enter­tain­ing) “Wasn’t the pulse just rock­ing us / No sense at all pre­tend / There was a con­nec­tion / Was it ever thin / Birds in a row / Infor­ma­tion trav­el­ing under them.” Some­how, it all works, how­ever lit­tle sense it makes (it doesn’t hurt that Dickey’s voice is in full force while he’s singing it all).

The instru­men­tals of Let It Sway are com­posed of an inter­est­ing blend of Some­one Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin’s ear­lier style and newer influ­ences, includ­ing, per­haps most promi­nently, folk/country. That appears instantly with the excel­lently phrased first track, “Back in the Sad­dle.” SSLYBY then returns to some­thing closer to their ear­lier style with the sub­se­quent track, “Sink/Let It Sway,” which begins with a gui­tar line some­what resem­bling the begin­nings of “Glue Girls” and “You Could Write a Book,” from Per­sh­ing.

And while the album waf­fles pleas­antly through var­i­ous blends of gen­res, it’s hard to miss how much SSLYBY has devel­oped musi­cally as well as the­mat­i­cally. We remem­ber Per­sh­ing very fondly, sim­ply because we absolutely loved a select sub­set of the tracks, namely “Glue Girls,” “Think I Wanna Die,” and “Oceanog­ra­pher,” (and maybe one or two oth­ers). But the rest of Per­sh­ing was not really all that good; most of the tracks were some­what dull, and some resem­bled each other far too closely. That is sim­ply not the case on Let It Sway. SSLYBY’s newest album is strong all the way through, with tracks that develop and flow excel­lently and with a wealth of diversity.

Let It Sway is not only a solid album, but, thanks to SSLYBY’s ever-entertaining writ­ing and sound, a fun one. It is def­i­nitely not another Per­sh­ing, but we couldn’t have asked for a bet­ter sequel. Let It Sway goes with a bit of a dif­fer­ent approach, but still one which does a great job at demon­strat­ing every bit of SSLYBY’s cre­ativ­ity. As good as Let It Sway is, Some­one Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin still has some work to do before their albums move from being highly enter­tain­ing to heart-stoppingly excel­lent - at least if that is what they want - but they’re def­i­nitely on the right track.

This post is tagged 80-89, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin