The Chrysler
Cold War Classic
Flora & Fauna
Following up on last year’s pleasant, but mostly forgettable Failures and Sparks, Stockholm’s The Chrysler are getting much closer to perfecting their sound on Cold War Classic. Keeping everything blissfully lo-fi is where the groups truly succeeds, there’s a calming hush running through the haphazardly recorded and mixed music and vocals here. Take “The Strange is Fading,” which is buried in the middle of the disc, it’s created out of tom blows, ringing bass notes, austere finger-picking and a fleeting glockenspiel melody. The clap-happy “Failures and Sparks” features the best taste of the melodica that was the lifeblood to the band’s previous disc. Remarkably, despite such a soft capture of their sound, there’s a nagging sense of urgency driving the album. It’s like Arcade Fire plunging through a mid-winter snowdrift and only slightly lessening their pace. “While the Tide is High” and “My Teenage Judas” get their surplus energy surge from liberal doses of tambourine and trumpet respectively. That co-songwriters Pelle Lindroth and Anders E. Rudstrom have a gift for penning vocal melodies that have a feeling of untraceable familiarity and soaring distinctness only adds to the resonance this album holds. If The Chrysler keep moving in this broken and baroque direction, folk and lo-fi music fans will continue to have cause to rejoice.
The Chrysler: http://www.chrysler.blackside.org
