Indie rock these days gets often gets a much-deserved knock for its asexual and epicene ways. In a scene where boys where girls jeans and just about anyone not wearing a beard is at least sorta pretty, if in a Suicide Girls or Jonathan Rhys Myers b-team/stand-in kind of way, most folks seem more interested in avoiding the traps and trappings of modern lust than in thrusting (heh) their nose (and other bits) into it.

Not, however, The Very Foundation. The Portland trio attempts to fill the vacuum like few other bands currently on the scene (The National is first to mind as another act that displays similar interest in purplish pop. And, of course, Peaches.)

Admittedly, the overt sexuality of frontman Michael Lewis’s lyrics is sometimes too over-the-top. Key exhibits here would be lyrics about fucking until bleeding and cum-stained broken hearts (“Tell Tale Mark”), silent skirt shedding (“This Is What We’re Asking For”), and the entire chorus of “Feel Anything.” And the chorus of “Silk & Stilletos. And definitely the chorus of “My Angel, One Last Time.” You see the pattern here, right? It’s not like the salaciousness sneaks up on the listener, either; the album’s very first lyrics are “Were you always gonna wrap your legs around me/Or was it just that I was pretty and free?”

But, anyway, isn’t twee pop just as extreme in the other direction? In the end, I find The Very Foundation’s approach a welcome balancing act to the sexlessness of most indie music these days. While my own preferences may be more in the middle, it is useful to have a band like The Very Foundation pull the continuum a little more blue. (Note: I said most indie music these days. Certainly there are other bands that take a non-androgynous perspective to song-writing; I’m just saying they don’t add up to any kind of critical quorum. Feel free to add in the comments to this post your own favorite “mature” indie rock band – it’d be interesting to see what our readers would also classify in this category.)

Although it is the lyrics that initially catch and hold the listener’s attention, the band deserves to be better know for its instrumental work, both in terms of the original members of the line-up and the all-star collection of studio support they recruited. Frontman Lewis is a more-than-serviceable guitarist and mononomially inclined Bevan is a precocious percussionist, but with the assists they receive on track after track from members of bands like The Decemberists, Blue Skies for Black Hearts, and Blind Pilot turn This Restless Enterprise into something all the more special.

The songs where the band keeps things more compact (“Sings and Wonders,” “Better Get Off”) are solid, but the album’s outstanding first two singles both maximize the contributions made by their fellow Portlanders. “Feel Anything” finds Nate Query (The Decemberists) adding an additional degree of solemnity to Lewis’s tale of post-break-up depression, self-imposed anomie, and numbing sexual encounters with his work on bass and, especially, cello, while “Runaway to Tokyo” becomes a bombastic and free-wheeling entity with Query on bass, fellow Decemberist Jenny Conlee on a blazing Hammond Organ, Jasmine Ash’s breathy backing vocals, and Blind Pilot’s Dave Jorgenson absolutely ruling the horns.

The rest of the album features similar contributions: Jorgensen’s cup mute trumpet work on “Tell Tale Mark” and his contribution on “Calling All The Matadors” with saxophonist Jesse Kinder and tuba player Andrew Stern; Conlee’s subtle organ work on “Pornography “helping it to make the track sound almost church-ready,  and a nice involvement by just about every member of Blue Skies for Black Hearts (of which The Very Foundation frontman Lewis is a member and  whose own frontman, Pat Kearns, produced, engineered, and mixed This Restless Enterprise). And I’ll just say it – given the frequency with which they bring in bass players, The Very Foundation ought to have a band vote to bring Chris Chard aboard full time. He already graces nearly half the album’s tracks and more than holds his own in doing so.

In all, This Restless Enterprise is a comprehensive and complicated record that tends to be over-dominated by the hyper-prurient nature of the songwriting. My hope is that as the band moves forward, the lyrics will mature in a different way. As for the sound, however, that can stay as big and bold and augmented as it already is.

The Very Foundation self-released This Restless Enterprise on December 1st.

The Very Foundation – Feel Anything

The Very Foundation – Runaway To Tokyo