Bril, Airless Alarm

On first listen, the four San Clemente guys in Bril (vocalist/guitarist Dave Starr, guitarist/etc. Kris Winrich, bassist/percussionist Scott Nelson, and drummer Kelly Winrich) make me want to shake my head and consign them to the mental dustbin where I tend to throw most “Adult Alternative”-themed rock these days. With Airless Alarm, the band has distilled down their love of all things Brit-rock (think Radiohead, in particular, minus the fangs — they even paraphrase “High and Dry” on album closer “Sold Yourself to Luxury”) into a slab of AA-ready pop-rock that’s inoffensive enough to be played at your mom’s birthday party or your local college kegger without anybody getting up to change discs. (Heck, given that the band apparently named themselves after the fabled Brill Building in NYC, the songwriting home of folks like Jerry Leiber, Burt Bacharach, Paul Anka, and Neil Diamond, they may not even mind the AA tag.)

At the same time, though, Airless Alarm‘s not without its charms. Bril’s sound combines a lot of the things I like about Coldplay, Travis, or even Achtung Baby-era U2, and they do it with an adulatory fervor that I can’t help but admire. The arena-sized guitars shimmer and shine, practically demanding that they be blasted out of ten-foot-high stacks of amps on a festival stage somewhere, the vocals plead and swoop sweetly (with a bit of falsetto that puts all of this year’s American Idol wannabes to shame, actually), and the drums hammer and stagger right where they need to. There’re a few songs on here that jump out, like the defiant “Faster” (“Every time you run / I’m faster”), the darker, more sharp-edged “Lush,” and the soaring, insistently yearning pop-rock of “Far Away,” but mostly Airless Alarm is just a pleasant-sounding blur, sailing by and leaving me nodding my head but not sure why or what the hell I’ve been listening to. On the good side, while there aren’t many immediate handholds to grab onto, there aren’t any blatant fuckups or cringe-worthy moments that catch my ear, either, and that’s far from the norm with stuff like this.

Bril’s not breaking any new ground here — they’re happily treading in the footsteps that’ve been laid out for them over the past couple of decades. But what the hell; there’s a place for that in music, too, isn’t there? Not everybody needs to be Sonic Youth, pushing the boundaries of what may or may not be considered “rock.” If everybody who played music did it for the sheer inventiveness of it, I can safely say that I myself would have a hard time staying interested — on some level, it’s got to be about enjoying yourself. I’d submit that guys like these who just want to play music like their idols are just as integral to the musical universe. I may not be blown away by ’em just yet, but I hope they stick around.