This is the fourth album from Love as Laughter, a onetime solo project that has gradually metamorphosed into a full-time lineup. Sam Jayne, formerly of Lync, has dropped the lo-fi crackle of his earlier outings for a sound that, while by no means suffering from overproduction, avoids some of the pitfalls of that problematic approach to recording.
The album's title betrays its scope -- the band is, as the first track implies, going "Coast to Coast" stylistically, while maintaining a unity of intensity throughout. The aforementioned song is a scorcher, a four-on-the-floor scream of distorted guitars; it's the kind of song that has you singing along to the "ba-da-ba-da-ba" chorus midway through your first listen. "Temptation Island" follows, even faster, even more distorted, even more enervating than the first.
It's the third track, the morbidly amusing "Sam Jayne=Dead", that brings out another side of the band. It's a sort of "Ten Years Gone" white-boy blues, making the lyrics -- in which Mr. Jayne emphatically and repeatedly encourages someone to bring about his own demise -- very funny in a sort of meta-ironic way. Then it's back to the assault with "Put It Together", a classic-rock romp with a great heavy-treble sound on the guitars that stretches past the eight-minute mark without getting boring. This tune, along with the seven-minute epic "Miss Direction", serves as the album's centerpiece, with the latter song as languid and contemplative as the former is swaggering and assertive.
Throughout the disc's latter half, the key ingredient of the band's success becomes more and more obvious: the two guitarists really take advantage of the melodic possibilities of having two lead instruments. At times, their interplay is almost sublime, recalling the Velvet Underground's classic twin-guitar songs, like "What Goes On." Even the lesser tracks, such as "French Heroin", cohere around this sound. The group abandons guitar squall altogether for the monotonous, accordion-dominated "The Square," and in the process manages to produce the most boring song on the album. Contrast this with track ten; though it sports a similarly slow tempo, the band stays with its strengths, ending the album with an effective if overlong coda.
Sea To Shining Sea is a fine album -- the kind that proves, once again, that however many times it's declared dead, there are still some memorable sounds that can be wrenched from the corpse of guitar-centered rock and roll.
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