‘New Chain’ Complex at the Cost of Intimacy

It’s a long way from an uncle’s attic to a professional studio, and Small Black are feeling the distance. The indie rock quartet self-recorded its first release, an eponymous EP, in the aforementioned attic in 2009, garnering praise for the record’s creativity and intimacy. Their recent debut LP, “New Chain,” came from quite another source—reputable indie label Jagjaguwar—and while Small Black’s tracks are undeniably fuller-bodied and more complex for it, they also appear somewhat stripped of the band’s individual creative spark.

“New Chain” certainly sees Small Black flexing their composition muscles with the expansive production opportunities a studio provides—each track is a dizzying collage of synthesizer textures and electronic beats, deftly laced with neo-tribal percussion and gently breathed vocals.

“Camouflage” begins the album with a dark synthesizer pattern and the heavy footfalls of a drum machine, gradually weaving in shimmering keyboard waves and clattering percussion until it rises into a chaotic interplay of synthesizer wails. The rest of the album follows suit, an elegantly choreographed bustle of synthesizers, beats and vocal echoes. “Photojournalist” builds a woozy electronic opening into a perfect blur of computerized swirls and thuds; “Panther” floats soaring vocals over delicate tones and an echoing beat; “Invisible Grid” fades the album out with an ethereal texture of synthesizer shrills.

As works of technical composition alone, the tracks are near perfect—they are cohesive through a common palette of sounds, but they remain diverse and balanced through carefully organized, admirably complex mixing. In this regard, “New Chain” is a triumph, a phantasmagoric and captivatingly dense world of sound.

Yet in the context of Small Black’s contemporaries and influences, “New Chain” also shows some unwillingness to expand from the sounds of well-established groups—or, for that matter, to further explore the unique sound Small Black seemed already to have.

The DNA of the band’s predecessors is glaringly obvious in “New Chain”—Yeasayer’s tribal-infused indie-pop, Flying Lotus’s garbled beat collages, Passion Pit’s glittering synthesizer waves, and (by far most evidently) circa-2008 Animal Collective’s electro-freak-folk aesthetic. “New Chain” seems to take pieces from all these sources and knead them together into track after track. It’s not done unconvincingly; indeed, Small Black’s tracks often turn out as good (and sometimes even better) than those of their influencers, but they lack exploration of any original sound.

This is particularly tragic in Small Black’s case, considering they already exhibited a promisingly novel sound in their earlier releases. They weren’t just another Animal Collective imitator—rather, the electronic beats that drive “New Chain” were combined with lo-fi fuzz and jangling riffs to create a unique hybrid. But instead of expanding on or reproducing this sound, they have renounced their cross-breed and stuck to collages of purely electronic beats and textures.

Furthermore, the “Small Black EP” style seemed to capture a feeling their new sound cannot. On “New Chain,” they are unable to resist the charms of studio-produced instrumentals and dense layering, but this approach is insufficient to evoke the depth and emotional power some of their songs could have had.

In particular, “Light Curse,” “Crisp 100s,” and the title track are contemplative and meandering as well as relatively long, and not surprisingly they begin to feel boring or repetitive. For most bands this would present a flaw in songwriting, but for Small Black it is a question of method—with the intimacy of Small Black’s lo-fi side present on their earlier work, these tracks could have been raw, tender or restless. Instead, the band stubbornly uses the same old formula of echoing vocals, unobtrusive beats and undulating synthesizers, which ends up feeling incongruous and purposeless for such slower, gentler pieces.

Granted, these tracks can still be considered impressively mixed and dazzlingly lush—their flaw is that they carry little emotional weight because they frame contemplation in the same elements that made cuts like “Search Party” and “Camouflage” energetic. Small Black seem too entranced by the magic of the studio to consider their creative intuition.

Even so, “New Chain” is admittedly a very strong debut LP overall—new to the studio, Small Black already show themselves to be confident composers, clearly possessing the chops to craft a lush, cohesive and sturdy addition to the neo-psychedelic canon. But presently they are merely one link in this chain—to begin forming their own truly new chain, they need only return to their creative spark in tandem with this album’s evident compositional skill.