Wanderers

Self-conscious, mannerist and in love with a pop aesthetic that values disjunction and contrast above all, The Features seem to have picked the title of their latest EP with no little calculation. Contrast is full of moments where meter goes slightly haywire, guitars drop out, and background voices comment on the main action. The Features are in love with their own audacity, which puts them in a tradition that stretches back to the British Invasion. Earlier records by The Features, like the EP The Beginning, came across as pop that concealed its heart beneath various strategies. The Beginning’s “Bumble Bee” was a hybrid of Crosby, Stills and Nash and English folk-rock. On Exhibit A, their 2004 major-label debut, the band’s sprung rhythms drove their genre experiments off the rails, and they were canny about contextualizing their lyrics. “Me & the Skirts” suggested deracinated Texas boogie, and lyrics like, “Move to the country / Where the coast is clear,” challenged notions of irony. Contrast is more controlled. The title track serves as a compendium of their devices, and reveals their debt to the tense, baroque music of The Easybeats, The Kinks and David Bowie. “Contrast” is a soul-music pastiche, and begins with an asymmetrical, three-bar section and a guitar figure straight out of The Easybeats’ “Friday on My Mind.” The production plays background vocals off Matthew Pelham’s self-mocking singing, and the guitars skank along. Like most of Contrast, the title song seems formalist almost to the point of unease. Whether or not this is a comment on the group’s recent drop from Universal and subsequent career uncertainty, lines like, “Oh no, whoo hoo, whoo hoo / This won’t ever last / Whoo hoo, whoo hoo / That won’t ever pass,” come across as something less than revealing, but not quite evasive. The tone is nearly overripe throughout Contrast, but this is in keeping with the group’s aesthetic. “Commotion” has a touch of harmonic ambiguity. Ostensibly a tune about being bored in a “slow-paced” town, “Commotion” sports a chorus that uses the commonest of power chords. Like many of the band’s songs, it ends up being about something else, or about nothing; commotion makes things livelier in a small town, but Pelham also wants to get a “rise out of you.” This is pop that deliberately skirts banality in order to combat the ordinary. Some of Contrast seems merely self-involved. “Wooden Heart” is impeccably performed, and it rocks. As a pop band having a try at playing R&B, it’s interesting, but even a Southern group like the dB’s, whose early-’80s records were perhaps even more mannered than The Features’, couldn’t make themselves convincing as soul men. Still, Pelham seems intelligent enough to leave himself an out: he sings, “But one more problem still remains / Just can’t seem to make this thing / Work the way it should.” “Guillotine” is a cynical song whose central lines, “You’re just entertainment / For the girls and boys,” illustrate the problem any ambitious band face when they attempt to play self-conscious pop music. What makes “Guillotine” somewhat less than compelling is what makes Contrast fascinating—it could be more fully thought out, but that might well defeat the purpose of the record. What Contrast reveals is a smart band whose material isn’t always up to their overall conception. The record selects a few devices and makes them work, as on “I Will Wander,” which is a harsh stomp with what sound like deliberately pretentious lyrics. “Send in the angels / Send in the team / There’s a fire on the mountain / Fire in my jeans,” Pelham sings. In fact, he sings them twice, which only proves he’s got the courage of his convictions.