Aloha used to be a band with their heads in the clouds, creating songs that floated above the listener, painting hazy, dreamy pictures with their ever-present vibraphone filling every corner of their songs. Some Echoes, their self-assured new album, proves that these days the band keep things a lot more lucid—their heads are still partially in the clouds, but their feet are planted firmly on the ground.
While Aloha still maintains the serpentine, jazz-informed song structures and complex chord changes they are known for, Some Echoes continues their move toward the deceptively accessible, keyboard-laden and stripped-down sound that the band adopted on the underrated Here Comes Everyone LP in 2004. Without losing any of the jazz impulse that fueled the winding musical outings of their early work, this new batch of songs bristle with confidence and a greater focus, while remaining innovative as ever. Echoes sometimes recalls Jon Brion's I Heart Huckabees\ material in its penchant for '60s psychedelic pop, Elbow's less grandiose tracks or Talk Talk's more robust post-punk excursions, but the quartet's unique, ever-evolving sound makes comparisons refreshingly difficult.
Thanks to the band's versatility and their sheer musicianship, the music always remains easy on the ears even as the songs take unpredictable detours from major to minor keys and from plaintive balladry to propulsive climaxes. On Echoes, the lineup established on their last LP has hit its stride, creating music that explores the outer reaches of indie rock, coming back with proof that there is plenty of uncharted territory to cover.
Echoes finds the band sounding tighter than ever. Multi-instrumentalist T.J. Lipple makes expert use of his array of mellotrons and organs to add thick, warm textures all over the album. Where Aloha used to be indie rock's leading advocates of the vibraphone, Lipple's marimba functions as a more restrained replacement, locking into grooves with Cale Park's shape-shifting drum work and Matthew Gengler's melodic bass lines.
Production-wise, the band moves farther away from the hazy bliss of their early work toward a distinctly brighter, more precise sonic template—what was once an indie gumbo with no discernible ingredients is now an immaculately constructed layer cake of buzzing keyboards, ringing guitars and Tony Cavallario's earnest vocals pushed way up front.
All of this newfound clarity and focus has not eliminated Aloha's ability to write the sort of wistful epics that have characterized some of their best work.
""Ice Storming"" floats by on the strength of its thick chords and Cavallario's impressionistic lyrics. ""Come Home,"" a likely candidate for best song on Some Echoes, swings back and forth between a slinky, sexy groove in the spirit of Air's early work and a bright chorus with rising arpeggios, building into a towering mass of reverb and epic washes of synthesizer for a stunning, understated climax—the musical equivalent of daylight creeping over the horizon.
Aloha's music remains some of the dreamiest, most imaginative and carefully executed material in the indie rock scene. On Some Echoes, they present their musical mission statement more clearly than ever. Like the triumphant final track of the album, Aloha continue to build sonic mountains one layer at a time, moving ""Ever upward / Forever upward.""
\
