The Rosebuds

Birds Make Good Neighbors

(Merge)

Record Review by Karen A. Mann

You probably shouldn't listen to The Rosebuds' new CD, Birds Make Good Neighbors, if you're going through a break-up.  Really.  Ivan Howard's plaintive crooning, paired with an overall jangly ominousness throughout, is enough to bring tears to your eyes — even when he's singing about how everything is wonderful and right with his lover.  Maybe that's because there's always an underlying sense that everything is not right, and that his flowery declarations are masking some well-founded fears that this relationship, like so many others before, is going to end in a heart-rending, gory mess.

On their first full length, The Rosebuds Make Out (Merge, 2003), and this year's follow-up EP, The Rosebuds Unwind, the band showed a flair for winsome love songs full of vaguely-psychedelic hooks.  The hooks are still there, courtesy of Howard's reverb-laden surf guitar, and keyboard player/vocalist Kelly Crisp's understated keyboard playing.  A husband-and-wife duo, Howard and Crisp sing beautifully together, which is a good thing because there are quite a few sing-alongs in which they trade off of each other.  Of note is "Shake Our Tree," a hand-clapping call-and-response that almost dares you not to like it.

The band strays a little too far into Smiths territory on "The Lover's Rights," a song that not only borrows the Andy Rourke/Mike Joyce signature loping bass and straight-ahead drums, but features an impressive Morrissey imitation by Howard.  Perhaps that's fitting, since The Smiths were the original experts at creating beautiful, happy melodies for the loneliest lyrics.

Birds Make Good Neighbors ends on just such a note, only in reverse.  "4-Track Love Song" includes only a few lines of openly gushy lyrics, with one lover telling the other "the change is about to happen, and we'll be so happy."  But the melody is dirge-like, and Howard sounds lost but unafraid, as if he no longer has to worry that his dreams will be shattered because they already have been.  The saving grace is that no matter how lonesome the lyrics or ominous the melodies, the songs, for the most part, are so beautiful that you don't mind the pain.