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The
Alphabetical Order: The Unimpeachable EP
There are good albums, there are bad albums, and there are albums that inspire nothing but indifference. The Unimpeachable EP mostly falls into this last category. The individual members of The Alphabetical Order are talented enough and they’re clearly having a good time playing together, but the music they’re making is predominantly insipid, outdated alt-bombast that wasn’t very good the first time around and has little to gain from revival. TAO is supposedly influenced by mid-’90s alternative rock acts like Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots. I didn’t hear much evidence of the former, but the latter comes through in the wall-of-guitar grunge-crunch TAO relies on in most of the numbers here. STP was a watered-down Pearl Jam imitator when it debuted, so TAO can’t help coming across as gratuitous. What’s worse, besides drawing on the blandest of the alterna-rock bands, TAO also seems influenced by the pomposity of late-period Guns n’ Roses (think “November Rain”) and post-Black Album Metallica. TAO’s real weakness is not its grade-B source material, however, but the fact that its songs sound too workshopped, as if the band members attended some “How to Write a Modern Rock Song” conference and took very careful notes, paying most attention to the “Loud-Soft-Loud” lecture and the “Creating Artificial Tension” panel. Track five is the perfect example of this, as it builds and builds and builds for apparently no other reason than the masturbatory pleasure of TAO’s guitarists. The band sneaks a synth into the song, ostensibly to broaden its palette, but more likely to make sure they look like they’re on top of the latest trends. (It doesn’t help.) The thing TAO does have to offer is the fact that there’s a woman in the band. While she often goes off-key, there is something striking about Kate Rears’ unusual vocals, which split the difference between Nina Simone and Colin Meloy. Her lyrics are also a bit more promising than Gavin Dunaway’s, the nasally lead male vocalist who can only come up with lines like, “100 deceptions / did we believe every one / or just lock ‘em away / keep them safe / for a rainy day / to come?” My advice, Kate: drop the dorky dudes and form a Breeders-esque punk band with other out-of-place, so-wrong-but-yet-somehow-so-right femmes. All this being said though, there are without doubt plenty of people in the U. S. of A. who will take to TAO, especially hopeless nostalgia slaves who refuse to let go of 1996. And I’ll also acknowledge that TAO probably puts on a decent live show, since the one skill they’ve mastered is playing at orgasm-level volume and intensity. Still, TAO is ultimately a throwaway band and The Unimpeachable EP proves to be anything but.
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