One of the oldest unwritten laws of rock’n’roll is the one about drummers not being able to write songs. OK, maybe there’s still some truth in the rumour, but certainly your reviewer’s collection would be poorer if it was devoid of Grant Hart or That Petrol Emotion’s Ciaran McLaughlin’s input. Hell, it’s largely due to the latter that this writer’s long-term Scott Walker obsession was first galvanised, too. So don’t keep laying your lame drummer jokes on this hack, no sirree.
Besides, it seems Midwestern power rockers THE APPARITIONS have a skinsman capable of penning a handy tune as well. Drummer Robby Cosenza is the man responsible for the classy, low-slung chug of opening track “Electricity & Drums” here, and it’s one of those ridiculously catchy power-pop affairs that snags you straight away and drags you effortlessly into the Apparitions’ creative world.
And then you realise Cosenza is only one of four super-talented writers residing within The Apparitions’ ranks. Vocalist /guitarist Mark Heidinger, bassist Robbie Roberts and guitarist Eric Smith also appear regularly among the writing credits and while guitarist Davey Fallis’s name only appears as a musician, if the heavenly layers of guitars that assault your airspace with regularity are anything to go on, then he more than holds his own within the band too.
The apparent democracy makes for an equally generous listen too. Parts of it rock irresistibly, with songs like the Who-ish blast of power chording and Guided By Voices-style skewhiff pop sensibility of “Motor Skills”, the dignified and delicious “Shapeshifters” and the Charles Darwin-meets Devo-style (lack of) evolution commentary “God Monkey Robot” all proffering choruses that nestle snugly in your synapses. Heidinger, meanwhile, gets (meta) physical with the none-more fatalistic musings of the self-explanatory “Cemeteries” (“cemeteries full of souls/ fenced in with so many holes/ thousands and thousands of stories/ worries laid to rest”), but the spring in the music’s step is anything but sepulchral.
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Actually, the juxtaposition between the band’s apparent apocalypse-tomorrow lyrical obsessions and the immediacy and atmosphere of their music is one of the aspects of The Apparitions’ oeuvre that ensures you will return to them. Indeed, songs as disparate as the Radiohead-circa-“Street Spirit” enigma of “You Chirp Just Like Little Sparrows” and the dreamy, neo-Biblical “She Burned Out Their Eyes” display an alarmingly impressive diversity, while the there-by-the-grace urban horror of “With Wolf Clothes On” (“underground disaster shelter/ we’re in the dark, but we’re together”) is wrapped up in the sort of guitar hook it would take a JCB to remove.
Hearteningly, it all ends on a brief, but thoroughly lovely note of positivity with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Positively Charged”, where Heidinger sings “your heart skips a beat for all the right reasons”, which indeed it does as you listen to this going-places foursome. Indeed, while “As This Is Futuristic” sometimes delves into humanity’s longer shadows, it invariably comes up sounding life-affirming and suggests The Apparitions deserve more than to remain a rarely-seen, ghostly presence on pop’s top table.
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