DRUMS - Portamento

The New Yorkers Drums seemed – and still seem today – like characters who'd escaped from the sleeve of some minor Smiths single: happily chaste, not to say sexless, and as light as a swirl of benevolent (and respectable) 1950s froth, the kind that so tickled the vignette-like imagination of their mentor Jonathan Richman. And ultimately, these four (now five, as we'll see) romantic dream-thieves from the Big Apple have never stopped describing in detail, in their songs, the everyday existence of those same Smiths-anthology characters they resemble so closely — often unconfessedly frightened, Wertherian adolescents brimming with unexpressed love.

Light, we said, but not naive or naif, as it might also seem on the surface. No band is more programmatic or consciously artificial than Drums (perhaps only Horrors, for different reasons), "unoriginal" from the very start (their own words), as a deliberate strategic choice, and dizzying like a repertoire exercise that gradually, almost imperceptibly, becomes truer and more stylistically compelling than the original. The new "Portamento" (a seventeenth-century term indicating the vocal transition between two notes) confirms it: Drums resemble not so much a band as a harlequin patchwork of groups in poster or newspaper-clipping form, glued one on top of the other with feverish intensity. A meta-band singing meta-songs, drawing endless joy and pleasure from doing so.

Looking closely, nothing is really missing: from doo-wop to surf, by way of the girl-group blueprints assembled in the studio by Phil Spector (until recently there was talk of a possible collaboration with Mary Weiss of the Shangri-Las), all the way to the most refined neo-puritan bands of the Postcard label (the sharper-eared among you won't have missed the far-from-coincidental collaboration with the latter-day Edwyn Collins), as well as the crumbly, biscuit-dry indie-pop of the C86 era. But Drums have never hidden their passion for Sweden's Tough Alliance, which perhaps explains the grafting-on of synths (with a faint whiff of New Order) and electronic drums that mark the biggest new element of "Portamento", especially on tracks like "Hard To Love", "Money" (great lyrics), "I Need A Doctor" and "Searching For Heaven" (the most radically structured of the bunch).

After the worldwide success of their debut, the band, as many know, lost one of its founding members along the way (guitarist Adam Kessler, who apparently took up country life quite suddenly) but brought in two new members (including Miles Matheny, guitarist of wave-romantics Violens, absolutely worth hearing), shifting drummer Connor Hanwick to guitar and fellow guitarist Jacob Graham to synths. A chiasmus that has paid off, without overturning or distorting the debut's formula too much: a saxophone line embellishes the crystalline melody of "What You Are", and yet it feels as though not a second has passed since the old "The Future", an impression reinforced by the gorgeous "Please Don't Leave", "In The Cold" or "If He Likes It Let Him Do It" (among the undisputed emotional peaks of the collection). If anything, one could speak of a rapid compositional apprenticeship that's leading the band to discover an unsuspected complexity, and which may mark the gradual shift, who can say, from the small vignette to the full-blown fresco.

Meanwhile, "Portamento" lets itself be stroked like a little bag of pebbles — not too rough-hewn, but precious all the same — rolling between your fingers and blurring the memories of a summer already grown distant.

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11/09/2011