Acute

In this era of sad bastard music, it’s easily to become numb to the emotional plights of others. Album after album, year after year, you get the same issues that have been prevalent throughout the history of humanity: love (requited and otherwise), broken relationships, self doubts, depression, utter lack of purpose, and so on. It’s getting hard for musicians to come up with any new angles on the old subjects and it’s getting hard for many jaded listeners, among which I count myself, to really care on a visceral level unless the artist in question really manages to catch the audience in a tender place. There is a fine line between a proper heartbroken song that gives the listener a little nugget of truth and a guy whining about how he got messed over by his now ex-girlfriend for three and a half minutes.

Plus, let it be faced: “you broke my heart” is the standard subject one will go to when you sit down to write a song. It’s a relatively easy subject, given that the topic is so universal; everyone’s had at least a little bit of experience in it and this anyone can relate to it. However, easy crosses over into lazy and unimaginative without the proper talent to make the ol’ “you ripped my heart out and fed it to rats” thing interesting. Honestly, by this point, I’d much rather listen to an album that retells the history of the Hoover Dam in dramatic fashion than listen to another forty-five minutes hearing about some guitar player’s relationship woes.

So it’s in this grumpy mindset that I come across Los Angeles’s Acute, a trio at their core (back when the album was recorded anyways. They’ve since added a fourth), but readily backed throughout Arms Around A Stranger by an assortment of musicians and instruments: violin, viola, cello, trombone, trumpet, French horn, and so forth. The topic of discussion at hand? As the Psychedelic Furs once put it, love, love, love. It’s a complicated, torturous thing, isn’t it? Almost enough to make you want to come back as a (one assumes) emotionless snail in the next life, assuming you believe in that sort of thing.

Sonically, Acute harkens back to the crunchy post-Cure/post-punk guitar rock of Sunny Day Real Estate at their slowest and prettiest, particularly on the slow-burning, melodramatically titled “You Want? Take It! It’s yours” where said guitars are married to some quality orchestration. However, the spirit of Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me era Cure is also prevalent in here as well as Acute follow the idea that the most mopey of sentiments can do just as well sounding shiny and happy on the surface. Thus we have the punky (if you’d ever call electric E.E.M. punky, that is) powerpop of “The City” and “Follow You Home”. Elsewhere, “Rip Your Heart Out!” is a country rocker complete with pedal steel and “Trouble” is a bouncy piece of piano pop, not unlike what Mr. Brian Wilson was doing musically circa Pet Sounds.

Of course, the slower ballads tend to fit the mood of their titles better as there’s a trio of them backed with dramatic string seconds, synthesizers, and more downbeat melodies. “When We’re Alone” and the hidden track that comes after it both have the ghost of “Pictures of You” running through them, featuring that sort of yearning ache and melodic interplay. Vocalist Isaac Lekach has wrought some Magnetic Fields comparisons and, in truth, he does occasionally call to mind the HAL 9000-programmed-to-sad-isms of Stephen Meritt, but also manages to sound very much like Robert Smith, affecting the master’s standard “my voice is constantly yearning for something” mannerisms.

The running theme of the record seems to be the human desperation for love. It’s close to oxygen, you see. We all need it and are sometimes willing to look for it in places that it isn’t. In “You Could End Up In Love”, our hero is willing to continue pursuing a scornful woman based only on the vain hope of the song’s title. In “The City” and “Take A Step Back,” we get some yearning for a long lost flame because “I need you near me” and “I can’t love you if you’re never coming back”.

Occasionally, passion will boil over into finger pointing songs, such as the sentiment of “Trouble” (“You think you know me/ Well I don’t think you do”) and the vindictive “Follow You Home”. Also, there’s the somewhat condescending “Rush To It” where our hero tells some love mad someone to “save yourself for someone else/ some not at all like me”, giving a similarly-yearning female (that, alas, isn’t the one he yearns for) the old “oh, but you deserve to so much better than me!” strategy to get her off his back.

While Arms Around A Stranger isn’t remarkable, it’s a more solidly crafted album than most of its ilk, fairly indicative of a time and place when interest in the torturous nature of the romantic is strong enough to warrant an Ian Curtis biopic getting a wide release.

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