Loquat – Secrets of the Sea Review

Posted by Ian Parmenter on 10.28.2008

What does pop sound like when it grows up?

Who They Are: Kylee Swenson (vocals), Anthony Gordon (bass), Christopher Lautz (drums/vocals), Earl Otsuka (guitar), Ryan Manley (keyboard)

Who They Sound Like: The Cranberries, minus the accent, with more keyboard, singing a more-bluesy, less-rock style.

Where You Might Have Heard Them: One Tree Hill, Sansa music players, San Francisco

Track Listing:
1) Harder Hit
2) Who Can Even Remember?
3) Sit Sideways
4) Big Key, Little Door
5) Comedown's Worse
6) These Kinds Of Friends
7) Go Hibernate
8) Clearly Now...
9) In My Sleep
10) Shaky Like The Flu
11) Spiral Stairs or Escalators

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t realize I had heard this band before until I checked them out on Ye Olde Wikipedia. Sure enough, one of the songs that came on the Sansa I own was from them. I had listened to them and deleted them… I wasn’t that impressed.

Turns out, that song (“Swingset Chain”) was from their first album. It got the double-edged review of being good, but disapointing; the band was capable of so much more. Now, when you get a review like that, you’ve got two choices. Half-ass it and assume people won't care, or put even more effort into the next one and prove them right… you really are better than that. From the sounds of Secrets of the Sea, Loquat went with the second option.

Don’t get me wrong… this album isn’t full of peppy radio-play singles, dance-club movers, or rock anthems you’ll hear at sporting events. Giving it a listen, you’ll find yourself feeling like you’re in a smoky, trendy bar, sipping expensive martinis or with a cigarette wedged in the corner of your lips while you discuss culture and current events with your friends and their dates, all clad in fashionable black outfits. This is the high-class version of those songs that teen TV dramas have playing over the last few minutes to tell you what emotion you should be feeling now that the story is over, only with more a more mature feel to the lyrics and structure (This may be due to it being written during a turbulent period in the life of the band – the lyrics really remind me of that period in life where you’re questioning if you’ve fully made that transition from ’20-something’ to ‘grown-up’).

That’s not to say the whole album sounds exactly the same; there’s variations on the theme there, from the vocals in “Harder Hit” and “Big Key, Little Door” to the surprisingly-80’s-feeling guitar riff in “Sit Sideways” to the excellent background drum work on “Comedown’s Worse.” But the feeling behind it, a band saying that they’re the grown-up version of what the kiddies have been listening of the last few years, pervades every track.

Not to say there’s the occasional misstep. “Shaky Like The Flu” offers a questionable choice of rhyme in the chorus, and on one track… well, this is embarrassing. This has never happened to me before. But there’s one track, “These Kinds Of Friends”, that features a guitar that echoes from ear to ear… and it does so at just the right pitch, frequency, and speed to make me nauseous when I listen to it on headphones. I can only assume it’s just a freak of physiology that affects me, but be advised this otherwise-great album may cause side effects.

All in all, this is an excellent sophomore effort and a great disc to have going as background music for almost any social occasion; there’s not really a bad song on the album. There’s nothing that’s going to blow you away and be played on “Hey, Remember the 2000s?” a decade from now – but Secrets of the Sea isn’t about singles. It’s matured past that point to where single tracks aren’t as important as the whole experience.

The 411: When today’s crop of teeny-bopper artists want to write a mature, grown-up album, this is the disc that they’ll be aiming for. With a great female voice on vocals and just the right combination of keys, drums, and bass (with guitar applied where needed), Secrets of the Sea is about the music and the emotion, without going overboard into experimental or emo. It’s the perfect album to have playing at a party when you want to remind people you’re not in college anymore.

Final Score:  7.5   [ Good ]