Alligators – Piggy & Cups

Alligators, a Seattle indie-rock five-piece, has its aural sights set high. The band self-markets and promotes its own music, ensuring it gets to the right ears. The band also took the time to get things right on its debut, recording some of the material as a band at home and then getting the rest done at Two Sticks Audio, run by Death Cab For Cutie’s Jason McGerr. The result, on the band’s debut Piggy & Cups, is a sonically diverse effort which manages to call up comparisons to the likes of Radiohead and Pink Floyd without being derivative of either in the slightest. The highest praise I can give Piggy & Cups is that, as eclectic as the material is, the album plays extremely well as a whole. It can be enjoyed as a headphone listen or as background music, though at times the music will outright demand your full attention.

The album’s strongest individual track, “The Conqueror,” comes in at the midpoint of the eleven-track song suite, a simple guitar melody with instrumental accents and low-key vocals layered with hauntingly addictive background harmonics in the vein of the best work by the likes of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young had they ever dared to record with pre-The Wall Pink Floyd. On the alternate ends of the album’s tracklist we get “Where Does It Hide,” the closest the band comes to anything in the Death Cab For Cutie mold, and the album’s closer “Magic Woman,” the album’s most daring piece, which is intro’d by a ninety-second exercise in tribal percussion which comes at the end of “Way I.”

The opener suggests the band is a competant group of tunesmiths who may have created an album you’d want to hear a few times. “The Conqueror” shows they are capable of crafting the kind of hook most indie bands can’t handle to save their lives. The album’s closer shows they’ve got ambition, taking an intro Paul Simon would have loved to have on The Rhythm of the Saints and leading into an eerie track that could easily be something Thom Yorke might come up with while working with Chris Martin and Neil Young. The rest of the album is composed of well-developed melodies that, while they won’t necessarily stick in your head and get you singing along, help to provide the infrastructure for the sonic whole of Piggy & Cups.

This is not the greatest album you’ll ever hear, if you think I’m heading in that direction. In fact, I’d be surprised if this album will merit mention in my top ten of 2009 when all’s said and done. But it’s a very impressive debut because it shows Alligators are competant musicians who have the drive and the talent to do very interesting things. And in this musical climate, interesting is often a hell of a lot more important than perfection would be. I look very forward to hearing what this group can do with a few more albums under its belt. And in the interim, Piggy & Cups provides a solid musical diversion worth ferreting out as we head into spring.

No related posts.

Tagged as: Indie Rock, Seattle

blog comments powered by Disqus