aaamusic | On 10, Jun 2012

Oh. So Thrice were influenced by Radiohead, and now both influence This Calamity. We get moments of booming darkness, moments of intense skitteriness, and some really rather tender moments too. ‘I’ll Paint…’ is a promising and diverse “mini-album” which holds some treats, some misses, and an impressive sonic heft.

Starting with the sort-of-title-track ‘I’ll Paint You A Picture’ we are led in with a massive surge of latterday Thrice style rocking prog, in the best way. It’s all rather intricate and borders of calculated at points, but the heft of it in terms of sound and emotion are a lot more powerful than you’d first thing, blending brooding, dark verses thrumming with electro influences with a rather beautiful male/female duetting chorus that brings in acoustic hints that creep around the song’s body, and really rather poetic lyrics. We’re then confusingly thrown into the acoustic singer-songwriter vibe of ‘Moving Away’ that is unfortunately reminiscent of Frank Turner, which means that actually it isn’t bad at all – it is very earnest and heartfelt. It just also gets that bit too folky and confessional, but my own biases aside, the songwriting itself is actually hard to fault, if a little predicatable. The singer-songwriter pop is given a skewed noisiness in the piano-driven ‘Bottle Rocket’, which is the logical conclusion of a pop fan having a love affair with Radiohead and maybe even listening to The Mars Volta once in a while. There’s a sweet pop centre and veneer that gives the song a fairly accessible set of lyrics and hooks, but the crashing percussion and forever near-chaotic instrumentation elsewhere (jazz piano, anyone? Brass solo?) keep the song interesting. Same with ‘Broken Lips’, where the tale of a splintering life and fragmenting love is given a new dark upheaval with distorted bass, shifting tempos, moments of afrobeat percussion and stately piano waltz all portraying the tumult of such a moment.
Midpoint ‘In Need Of An Exit Strategy’ is actually genuinely unnerving, a stand-out song, yes, but whether I’d say it’s the total must-have is another question given the lyrical subject edging towards suggestions of mental illness and even suicide. There’s something about the flawless match of minimal instrumentation and passionate, oddly vulnerable vocal style (a department that This Calamity excel in) that snakes into the listener’s heart, and by the time the dark, cinematic music fully asserts itself, the song has just gone beyond words into a heart-wrenching catharsis. I suppose the closing track ‘This Carousel Just Keeps On Turning’ comes close in terms of startling lyricism matched by artful orchestration, but doesn’t quite reach the pinnacle of it all as it gets too bogged down in its own artiness.

‘I’ll Paint…’ is an exercise in frustrations. There are moments of impossible power for such a quiet and understated little thing, and when it gets it right it can be devastating, but the singer-songwriter pop feels overfamiliar at times, and the arty side gets a bit too slick jazz sometimes. But really I think that This Calamity could be a truly powerful art-pop presence if songs like ‘In Need Of An Exit Strategy’, ‘I’ll Paint A Picture’ and ‘Broken Lips’ are anything to go by.

★★★★★

Katie H-Halinski