(Merge)
There's nothing wrong with what Mikal Cronin is doing. The singer-songwriter knows his way around a hook and maximizes his use of each and every one of them. He's power pop in the latter-day vein of Matthew Sweet or (don't let anyone hear you say this) Gin Blossoms, when the gaze turned inward and the casual abuse of the other halves of the boys' (seemingly always boys') relationships calmed down. Cronin is twenty-five years old, not much younger than Sweet was circa Girlfriend, but something weird has happened in the intervening generation: a barely palpable, barely tangible fear. Cronin doesn't lash out, doesn't protest, doesn't even really signal much heartbreak or ill health to speak of. Everything is all too calm on MCII, which is its undoing. To put it another way: there's nothing wrong with it.
The polish has its benefits. The driving, snowy "Weight" that opens the record -- like a wistful, sensitive Smith Westerns -- is justifiably pushed to its gorgeous limits and is one of the best guitar pop songs, actually popular or not, to come down the pike this year. Much like Real Estate, Cronin seems almost like the Frankensteinian creation of those Youtube commenters who talk about how they love it when Yo La Tengo is "mellow"; "Shout It Out" is built on what sounds like a leftover Ira Kaplan riff, "Don't Let Me Go" drops the pretense and just cops the one from "The Summer" (itself an Only Ones lift, so we're not judging), and "Peace of Mind" is practically a full rewrite of "Did I Tell You." That's all fine. But bite makes sweetness special. The Byrds and Turtles knew that when they were inventing the busy verses and strange drumlines now revised on "Shout It Out" and "Change."
Like a lot of songs here, those are tempered by Cronin's other fixation: FM modern rock radio of the mid-'90s, which seems to be the primary frame of reference for his songs' peaks and choruses. "Am I Wrong," for instance, is already permanently in your head halfway through the first minute; unfortunately, Cronin sees little point in writing an actual song around the hook, instead just letting it sort of shapelessly support itself like a lot of mainstream bands (Collective Soul; Stone Temple Pilots) spent that entire decade doing. Their songs often blasted out with enthusiasm and went nowhere, like "Peace of Mind" and "Am I Wrong" here. But Cronin was born in 1987, so this is in his DNA and he's quite entitled. One song, "See It My Way," is practically a dictionary fusion of his two interests, reconfiguring "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with calm hippie folk rock to tirelessly amusing effect.
The sound of MCII is towering and slick and immediately appealing, like a latter-day R.E.M. album, or like any Tom Petty album. But as with either of those frames of reference, the closer you look at the thing, the hazier and emptier it seems. I lost patience earlier and earlier each time I listened to the entire LP, and that's with having a natural attraction to the kinds of noises Cronin likes and the way he lays them out. It's all songwriting, finally. Even the feedback and electric power turn on "Change" is as much throwback as a Yuck song, and starts falling down the "I'll Feel a Whole Lot Better" rabbit hole before it can really charm on its disaffected, superficial catchiness.
One can't object to the concept of basic, unfettered guitar pop with an edge; think of the Shins' first three albums, vividly recalled more than once here, especially on "Don't Let Me Go." But the Shins' James Mercer had a boldness of composition and a sense of passion in those days that Cronin's affable politeness and fatal love of the radio-pandering familiar cannot match. His songs soar and envelop, but only in the most obvious ways, formats, structures, places. There's nothing surprising or personal, certainly not intimate or idiosyncratic about them. His sole note of individuality is a slight tendency toward the prog-"epic" that gives these songs a potentially transportive, cloudy feeling that somehow stays rock-grounded. The thing is lean and fun enough for background music, but it gets tired fast. In one last throwback, the record even provides an additional '70s nod, to the old album-closing power ballad move. Title? "Piano Mantra."
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