| Lillies And Remains - Meru |
| Even the goths have to lighten up eventually. Now, it's not fair…it's not even accurate…to call Lillies and Remains goth. Sure, they took their name from a Bauhaus song, and yeah, their debut, last year's Part Of Grace, got a healthy chunk of its power from a dark, Dracula-esque tone that didn't exactly discourage thoughts of chilly evenings in dusky ruin. But now, with rock subcultures being so phenomenally fractured that they hardly merit the descriptor, bands can quite easily evoke past musical movements without having anything else whatsoever to do with the cultural trappings that initially inspired them. All the more intriguing then that, with their latest EP Meru, Lillies and Remains are aging exactly like their more explicitly spooky predecessors. To draw a Cure based parallel, they've gone from "Primary" to "Just Like Heaven," shedding their chilly exterior and stretching into airy, if still serious minded, pop music that maintains a beautiful, almost romantic wistfulness. Nowhere is this more striking than on "Tara Part 2: Fear Of The End," despite its having the most goth friendly title on the disc. Piano, quirky synths, strings…and vocalist Kent (just "Kent") even hints at falsetto. This track, as well as much of the rest of Meru, bears a striking resemblance to the bittersweet pop that emerged when the darker, if not necessarily gothic groups of the 80s (The Cure, Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc.) opened the curtains and allowed themselves to…well, maybe not crack a smile, but at least go out into the sun. "Decline Together" actually sounds a bit like it could have come from one of the assorted mixes of Killing Joke's (unfairly) maligned foray into atmospheric pop, Brighter Than A Thousand Suns. But like fellow 80s obsessed mist poppers The Mary Onettes, Lillies and Remains are far too skilled to be reduced to a list of their influences. They may wear their record collections on their sleeves, but they're good at this stuff, and it's much more appropriate to view Meru as continuing in a tradition that was all too short lived the first time around. Although the newfound breeziness dominates, the band hasn't totally dropped the spiky seriousness that made Part Of Grace so striking. Single "Devaloka" whips up a nice sinister head of steam, the disc's main reminder of how musically powerful Lillies and Remains can be in terms of rock muscle. Likewise, "A Life As Something Transient" features a rousing back half while staying a shade or two darker than its surroundings, even if its brief jazzy guitar asides hint at a mischievous tease. Meru does feel a bit transitional…it's an EP, after all…but it's an excellent transition, one that feels enormously promising. It's especially encouraging that, in choosing to up the pop quotient of their music like many others, Lillies and Remains beat the odds by completely avoiding the flavorless, uninspired earnestness that renders so much pop leaning Japanese rock virtually undistinguishable (and unlistenable.) Kent is far too emotive a vocalist, and the band has far too firm a grasp on the balance between atmosphere and brevity, to surrender to the ocean of Jrock facelessness. I hope these guys stay together long enough to make their Ocean Rain. |