All We Could Do Was Sing

We Say...

Review by Yancey Strickler

Sure, All We Could Do Was Sing is a bit of an amalgam, its 11 songs effectively capturing what so many people love about the Decemberists and Arcade Fire and other indie luminaries, sometimes musically but more often in a sort of nervous, brainy excitement that explodes in songs like opener "I Woke Up Today," with its beginning drum pounds that I find myself wishing would continue through the whole album, like some indigenous revival. But the record does slow and swoon, and singer Van Pierszalowski has the perfect, broken voice to lead those disappointments and slow crumbles to the floor. "I'm doing okay for a young man/ I've got a place to stay," he sings in "Fisherman's Son" (my favorite track), sounding a bit like Neil Young on After the Gold Rush, a boy realizing he is destined to be a man he distrusts. There's a heartbreaking sweetness to his lament: "I am a fisherman's son/ That is what I will become."

The theme of All We Could Do Was Sing is desperation, but not, interestingly, resignation. Pierszalowski and Cambria Goodwin understand the slow death of life, and they react with either a quiet fortitude ("I'm not ready to settle down" in "Don't Take My Advice," a possible answer track to (again) Neil Young's brilliant "Tired Eyes") or a euphoric sense of denial, both polemic, American reactions to the absurd challenges of life.

So does that make this record a bummer? Not at all. It's more of a commiserater and collaborator, a conspirator in your own plots against life's exhaustions. The sounds are familiar, and so are the sentiments. It's from those recognizable perches that All We Could Do anchors itself deep in your insecurities and darkest sadness. And there it stays.