If you’re short on time I’ll tell you right now, Birds, Sing the Car Alarm has two great songs, two good songs, and two neither-great-nor-good songs. Put another way: this is an EP that should have been a 7″. There’s far more to say, but in short this effort represents an imperfect sampling from a group with a lot of potential.
Let me just get the negative bits out of the way now. For starters, “Resume” should not be on here. As the second track it absolutely kills the momentum of a truly great opening track. Having an equally strong third track only makes it seem more out of place. I’m not trying to pick on this one song, but from the very first listen all I could hear was Andy Samberg. If this isn’t Andy Samberg yelling into a microphone then I might have recently suffered a stroke. The second half is mostly above average, but it ends poorly and I’ll get into that later.
As for the highlights, I don’t know if it was the side effects of the Beatles remasters I was also listening to, but “Tri-State Area Blues” totally reminds me of old rock music. So much modern music is about fitting into a sub-genre, “sounds like”, “for fans of”, and so on. “Tri-State Area Blues” is just a rock song, simply, and it’s a great one. Of the 6 songs on this EP, this is the one that seems most able to grab your attention immediately, and I even found myself singing along several times. One irony of the 10 Listens methodology is that I did become quite aware of how overly bass-heavy this song is, especially when cranked. And through headphones it’s quite clear someone in the right channel sucks at singing in tune. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t detract from the song.
I was even more impressed with “Pink Screaming”, and this is where my 7″ argument comes in. This plus “Tri-State Area Blues” on a 45 would be a great find at a record store. I love the vocal in particular, it’s isolated in a way that consistently reminded me of Superchunk, and that’s rarely a bad thing. Where “Tri-State Area Blues” is raucous and lively, “Pink Screaming” comes off almost introspective and small. It wound up being my favorite track to hear through headphones, as well.
As noted earlier, the final three songs represent a mixed bag. It’s worth mentioning that there’s a lot of atmosphere going on throughout these songs. There are samples, loops, diversions into chaotic noise – the sort of stuff that happens during band practice. In fact, if you drop the treble during some of these songs you’d swear your neighbors are running through their set again. “Blood Pressure”, with it’s distinctive opening guitar and spasmic ending, is the song you’ll remember from this half, but “Another Season for the Priests of Reason” is more interesting. With it’s tribal background arrangement and awkward harmonies it wouldn’t be out of place on an older Animal Collective album. It’s certainly better than the closing track “Wild People”. Like “Resume” before it, it’s rather obnoxious and, for me, it’s a rather poor way to end the EP. The temptation to skip the track and move on to Warren G in the iPod was always there.
All told, I think the interesting bits here overpower the dead weight. Not every piece or collection of music is perfect, or genius, but Video Daughters deserve your ears. Birds, Sing the Car Alarm is still on my iPod, it’s been played more than 10 times, and if Video Daughters ever put out a full length I’ll gladly give them another 10 listens.