First kiss, first love, first grasp of the power of rock ’n’ roll: None of these crucial moments in life can ever happen again, but rock ’n’ roll offers the most opportunities to discover another moment so close to the first that a micrometer for the soul might have trouble measuring the difference.
Consequently, rock ’n’ roll also offers the most disappointments, although Mediac, the fourth album from The Most Serene Republic, is a disappointment mainly because the grunts of close calls and the sighs of resignation are so audible.
That resignation might be the “indie” side of the indie-rock crossbreeding that brought the Canadian sextet into being more than a decade ago. The music cranes its neck for the anticipated burst from clouds into stratospheric blue…and then, too many times, veers back into vapor.
In “Fingerspelling,” the vapor gathers around power-pop peppiness and dissipates it into a hasty fadeout. In “Failure of Anger,” the vapor initially thrums like street noise beyond the window ledge where a banjo and violin converse, before it mutters too loudly for that conversation to find its proper denouement.
Attributes shared with better-known indie rockers—the Polyphonic Spree’s joy in “I Haven’t Seen You Around,” Of Montreal’s sense of place in “Ontario Morning”—emphasize how completely, avidly and foolhardily those other rockers, particularly their frontmen, inhabit their songs.
Adrian Jewett, The Most Serene Republic’s lead singer, is not detached, as proven by his emo whispering and warbling on “Nation of Beds”; he’s just not as firmly attached as he could be.
Once, with “The Feels,” Mediac resembles that reawakening of first-time wonder, albeit with Ben Folds Five conceptualism burdening its Flaming Lips freeness. The rest of the album is not close enough for rock ’n’ roll.
