American Princes – Other People

Album Reviews • Thursday February 5th, 2009 • 2:00 pm

Other People begins with a double snare-beat and some ringing, dueling guitars in the lackadaisical pep-rally of a song, “Auditorium.” Altogether it’s a lazy, hummable tune with a meaning that might be severely demented or exquisitely coy (sample lyric: “love don’t mean nothing…/you won’t feel a thing”). The coyness dissipates in just under three songs with the roaring yelp of “Kid Incinerator” and is driven six feet under by the time the closing number rolls in, the dejected anthem, “Born to Die.” And what Other People imbues is a realm where a rock song still has a damn fine sing-along melody, some occasionally accidental introspective lyrics, and slower numbers that spike their sweetness with acid. It also just happens to have the best song The Shins never wrote on it, too.

Influences and derivations are null within the confines of the record. There’s plenty of Beach Boys, Big Star, and Guided by Voices to be heard in every tune, but the band never engages the listener in a game of “spot-the-influence.” The influences are tangible but the details are finely tuned and exquisitely crafted piece-by-piece that they become the central focus: a syncopated bass line, an intense lyric or well-placed chord stand out after multiple listens. “Watch as They Go” is the aforementioned Shins’ song that would have carried Wincing the Night Away to mega-stardom (face it, it needed a few more great songs that what it had) and “Still Not Sick of You” has the crunchiest GBV chord progression overdubbed with the sweetest, chirping Disintegration-era Cure arpeggios.

American Princes is doubly fronted by two vocalists and songwriters, Collins Kilgore and David Slade (with one addition from guitarist Will Boyd), and both men seem to work towards a unified goal: to write the tightest, most memorable rock songs they can muster while trimming away the excess detritus of modern rock songs. A difficult task for certain given that the band is a five-piece with three vocalists and three guitars. But songs like the sweetly abrasive Raymond Carver nod “Where I’m Calling From” require more than three listens to pick up on each distinctive guitar sound. Unlike most rock records, the bass and drums are out in front (likely a result of working with producer Chuck Brody who has produced Wu-Tang Clan) and the guitars are nuanced, but distinct. Likewise, songs like the superb “Real Love” are bolted to the floor by their one-two line repetitive choruses (“I don’t care about real love/ I just want a world that will bear its own weight”) and the crushing reality in Slade’s vocals; a man on the edge of sanity, believing in imminent breakdown.

I saw American Princes open for Lucero on a frigid December night in a dive bar. Their first full length Less and Less had just come out and I remember not being very impressed and thinking that they might be a decent band in a few more albums. Now, after the exceptional quality of Other People, I’m left to wonder if I was simply naïve or if my juvenile ears were too unrefined to notice the band’s raw talent. Either way, the dynamic shifts on Other People and the melodies that pack every song suggest that American Princes were just waiting for the right time to come into their own with the right album to show. Other People is that album.