Loose in the Air

 Brooklyn outfit The Double serves up a very interesting blend of unsteady, faltering noise, loose melodies that border on pop, and tunes you can easily start whistling. Just not every day. Only on cloudy days and foggy mornings. They recorded their first record, Loose Crochet, as a folk-noise duo in 2002, after which the band grew into its current lineup, which can boast two more studio efforts – Palm Fronds (2004) and Loose in the Air (2005). The smoother melodies and the electronic-organic mix of keyboard chemistry and stunted-sounding drums came out of a hand injury drummer Jeff McLeod picked up in that period from his more conventional drumming.

With the boom of technical novelties like Pro-Tools back in the day, recording and self-production got cheaper than ever. But the open possibilities of this kind of music-making can also turn into a mortal wound for music’s earlier enrichment with ideas and a wealth of noise. You can forget about the specific purpose of creating an ambience we couldn’t get before. The whole facade of musical discourse can easily go two-dimensional and get drained of all the juiciness of the real physical presence of a musician wringing the utmost out of their instrument. The Double fell for the temptation too. On their first records they championed low-resolution production, but they managed to pour the change into a new vessel that actually holds water. The new approach has softened the band up and set them free, in a way that makes the listener feel this forced, softened noisiness is what they were actually striving for. From the sophisticated noise that was carefully measured out on the previous two albums, or at least on their debut as a quartet, Palm Fronds, they slid into a state of a classic, more polished approach. Rather unexpectedly, judging by the other two releases, they slipped into the realm of conventional indie rock, heavily infused with the flavor of The Smiths, Morrissey, or even a mellowed-out version of Butthole Surfers. This is how Sonic Youth would sound if they ran out of noisy projectiles and salvos of dissonance. There are bright moments on the record, though, where you can sense they haven’t completely sacrificed their earlier direction. Opening song Up All Night tastefully weaves the ominousness of electric static into the structure of an almost jazzy melody, which blends masterfully with the noir-pop-noise treat Idiocy, perfect for all Pixies fans. If anything sets The Double and their album apart, it’s definitely a sense of melody they never give up from start to finish. How fired up they can get when playing rock is hinted at by the track What Sound It Makes The Tunder, though it could use a bit more bite and punch. And while the record is by no means short on lovely moments, Loose in the Air feels more like a collection of vignette ornaments than a cohesive album. Then again, maybe that only signals a new direction, a peculiar way of blazing a trail through the jungle of hard-hitting sound they might still produce in the future. Loose in the Air is a melancholic poultice, or a band-aid, for all the nostalgics who miss eighties electronics and pop that doesn’t exactly push you into ecstatic dancing, but makes a fitting backdrop for reading a not-too-demanding book or emptying your mind.