Mrs. Citizen and I hit the Cleveland Museum of Art last weekend.  While the museum is still in the midst of a mammoth construction project, a few galleries are open again and there are special exhibits popping up on a pretty consistent basis.  Currently, they’ve got a special collection of Lee Friedlander’s photography and an awesome exhibit on art and power in Central Africa.  (I swear this is coming around to rock music soon.)  The art and power exhibit is the one that’s germane here, featuring 60 central African sculptures, originally intended to mediate between the human and spirit worlds.  These communally owned sculptures were visible markers of both power and connection to a world beyond our own.  For both their physical beauty and cultural importance, they’re pretty awesome.  The part that stuck in my brain as a music critic, however, was a piece of text on the wall about the relationship between art and artist as perceived in some of the cultures; the artists who made the sculptures were almost always anonymous, leaving little or no trace of themselves on the art they had created.  The perception was that they were not artists at all and that their creations were not original works in the same way that we generally think about art objects.  Instead, the sculptors were channeling the vision of the spiritual realm, more or less just copying from an idealized form that had already been crafted by the power figure being represented.  Since they weren’t seen as creating anything original, there was no need to carve their names into the statues.  This notion of the artist as spiritual conduit, for me, fell apart a bit because of the technical and emotive brilliance of the sculptures themselves; regardless of cultural perception, dudes were artists. All this to introduce the new record from Austin based band, Monahans.  Monahans are tapping into the sounds of a lot of idealized figures (Bruce Springsteen, early REM and mid-period Wilco, principally, but also artists further afield, maybe late-period Miles Davis, and, possibly Sonic Youth, a la “Wildflower Soul”) on their sophomore record, Dim the Auroras, but they imbue those borrowed sounds with a presence of their own.  A lot of bands have ripped off the Boss with mediocrity, much as a hacky Chokwe sculptor could bang out a sub-par power figure, but Monahans take some of the Boss’s conventions, wrap their own sensibility around them and craft a new artistic vision.  The Art Museum is worth visiting sometime soon.  Dim the Aurora is worth picking up when it hits stores on May 19.

I was initially drawn to Monahans on the strength of the album’s first track, “It’s Enough to Leave You…”  You know how we roll around here: if we like it, we write about it; if we don’t like it we ignore it.  The rest of Dim the Aurora could have been field recordings of whale songs and I still would have written about “It’s Enough to Leave You…,” which is rapidly moving its way into my  list of go-to songs to play on the way into work.  The oddly hypnotic off-rhythm big-group handclaps, the upbeat guitar sound, the intermittent hand shaker and the build-up to the sing-along chorus all work together to power a near perfect rock song.  The lyrics are vague enough to sound meaningful and inspirational and their smoky delivery encourages that bent.  All around, you could do worse than listen to this album’s first track over and over.  Five or six of the eleven tracks on Dim the Aurora work in this breezy, accessible, toe-tapping mode.  “I Run to You” is a big, old-fashioned, straightforward rock anthem, complete with frenetic rides on the high-hat, power chords over the chorus and lyrics that encourage running towards things and/or people.  The title track is the most Springsteen-esque, notably in the vocal delivery.  Again, it’s a toe-tapper that isn’t throwing a lot of curveballs.  “The Low Light” is the song that most recalls Wilco, with yearning lyrics over a piano driven, half-country shuffle. (It’s the track that would make the playlist you made a fancy dinner on an anniversary; it’s also my clear second favorite song on the record.)  Monahans don’t quite get to the level of “It’s Enough to Leave You” on the remainder of songs that work the same vein, but the songs that hit familiar notes are well-executed and catchy.

Things get a bit more interesting when Monahans take some left-turns; they’re unafraid to get weird now and again, despite the mainstreamy sensibility described above.  Songs like “The Low Light” often have a subversive twist; that track has strangely intricate percussion behind it, a mainstay throughout the album.  “Fit for Fire” is a pretty straightforward upbeat number, but with aggressive, splashy, unpredictable guitar rips laid over top, multi-tracked vocals and a devolution into an acid-jazz freakout at the end.  (On second thought, maybe it’s not that straightforward.)  The most clearly adventurous move on Dim the Aurora, however, is the inclusion of three instrumental tracks, evenly spaced over the record.  Monahans are a quartet, pulling in some musical buddies on a few tracks, but on the instrumental pieces, they often sound like a full-on orchestra of noise.  The first song without words, “Night #3,” comes out of nowhere on the first listen and sounds like three or four songs being played at once, with a mammoth drum sound and subtly at odds guitar and bass parts.  It sounds like they just shut the door on the studio, started jamming and pulled the best three minutes; there’s a weird synchronicity where all of the instruments are doing their own thing, but are still locked in to each other.  The longest song on the record (or most records, for that matter) is the twenty-minute wandering jam that nearly brings the album to a close (more on that in a minute), “Terrene,” which moves at a casual pace across a fairly barren soundscape.  There’s a lot going on in the track, but it takes a while to develop.  It’s worth the time, though, in that, as with much of the record, it’s got a hypnotic quality that sucks you in.

The album closes with “Distorted Signals,” which emerges from the fuzz at the end of “Terrene” and acts as a kind of coda to the record as a whole.  After the long trip through the desert of “Terene,” Monahans close with an earthy, bluesy song that is both powerful and hummable.  There are distorted, ambient voices playing underneath the track throughout and a wicked slide guitar out front; it’s a solid way to close the album, in that it speaks to a lot of what Monahans seem to be about, a merging to the experimental and the accessible.  If neither were present, Monahans might not work as well, but the degree to which the band walks the line between the living room and the sweat lodge is both admirable and enjoyable.  The album is out on May 19th from Misra.  In the meantime, good luck getting “It’s Enough to Leave You…” out of your head.

“It’s Enough to Leave You…” – Monahans

Per-order Monahans at Insound.