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LOTD
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The Snake The
Cross The Crown: Mander Salis
This ten-track album from Santa Barbara, Californias mystically named The Snake The Cross The Crown really starts at track five. The four emo-style indie rock tunes that precede it are without doubt far better than average, but it is by means of the starkly beautiful, acoustic led On the Threshold of Eternity that this five-piece begins to announce its own original voice. With stunningly poetic lyrics, Threshold is one of those instant keepers a song that will haunt you even before it has reached its conclusion. It mixes a folksy up-tempo stride with a melancholy vocal performance and a lush sonic atmosphere of vulnerability and uncertainty. Guitarist Kevin Jones and bassist Carl Marshall share singing duties, perfectly melding their gentle tenors and lilting falsettos with the delicate keyboard swells and heavily effected drums that float underneath them. Initially a meditation on the invisible passing of time (Eternity is pressed against my eyelids / by brittle fists that I cannot avoid / and though each fingers grip has been relentless / the moments they just keep on slipping by), the song also becomes a rumination on the artists unique relationship to missed opportunities: All my words are spread across the canvas / no one's seemed to see the things I say / and though these eyes were once those of an artist / failure has relieved me of a face. Track six, The Sun Tells the Moon, is another muted triumph. Although it employs electric guitar and builds to a noisy denouement, it hangs out in the same mournful, contemplative spot as the song before it. Not unlike a Shel Silverstein poem in its fantastic imagery of living, breathing inanimate objects, it envisions the moon and the sun coming to understand one anothers unique role in the heavens and the shortcomings of their vastly different positions: We are the children's lips / thirsty for just a glimpse / of what is right and wrong / because we can't accept our lives. Track seven takes us back to the quiet acoustic loveliness of track five, though A Brief Intermission is far more sparse. One voice, one acoustic and a gentle tapping are eventually embellished by accordion and louder percussion sounds, but its nonetheless a bare, chilling track all the way through, somewhat reminiscent of All Things Must Pass-era George Harrison which only makes the Radiohead-esque blip-and-bleep intro to track eight that much more astonishing. While the first track of the album also employs an attention grabbing, synthed-out opening section, here it seems more fitting, as its followed by a less run-of-the-mill rock tune that brings to mind bands like Dire Straits and even the Beatles as opposed to The Snake The Cross The Crowns countless emo contemporaries. But theres no denying that this young band has much more to offer when its not balls-to-the-wall rocking out, and instead has its focus on its true strengths: gripping melodies, intelligent lyrics, gorgeous vocals, and carefully constructed sonic gift wrap. Track ten brings things to a close much the way OK Computers The Tourist does: absolutely soaring vocals lift you right out of the experience. But when this disc ends and your free fall begins, you are likely to flip back not to the beginning, but to track five, so you can start, as it were, all over again.
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