The new Very Soon, and in Pleasant Company--SN's third release, following 1997's Save Everything and a split EP with MetroSchifter in 1998--presents a monument to torpor. All but one of its seven songs could be fairly described as languid, and its last three ("Quiet Victories," "Contents of a Landfill," and "How to Draw Horses") go so far as to approach traditional balladry--if one were to discount its three-minute codas. But fittingly, even these accessible moments suffer from the same problems that plague SN's more difficult songs: The band can't turn its potentially interesting parts--good rhythms, tight dynamics, or, here, nice melodies--into a worthwhile whole. A melody will present itself and go nowhere for eight minutes; an interesting drum part wastes itself behind forgettable guitar leads; and so on. The songs grab you for a few seconds, then strand you, neither inspired nor angry but increasingly uninterested. The band need not have mastered complex structures to accomplish that.
Not that Very Soon approaches fusion (unless you'd care to get picky about those guitars on "Nine Bodies, Nine States"). This is rock music, played by guitar, drums, bass, and the occasional viola/piano vibe; it attempts to be evocative and precise, but it doesn't pretend to hate itself. It's best, not surprisingly, at its most understated and simple: "Actual Blood," with its creepy guitar lead and mumbled vocal, or the first part of "How to Draw Horses." But such moments merely punctuate an album of compositions that, at very best, you'll forget to like. Shipping News' music has sometimes been called math rock, but one suspects that the band's primary calculation does not involve time signatures or tight playing, but rather that complex structures, delicate packaging, and literary pretensions equal a memorable band. Though it's fathomable that Shipping News have it in them, they haven't added it all up here.
