The Riff Tiffs, Afflictinitus

Okay, I give. I’ve been listening to The Riff Tiffs’ Afflictinitus for several weeks now, off and on, and I’ve had quite a time getting a handle on it, somehow. I don’t know how to take these four H-town kids — are they part of the whole nu-space-rock movement that seems to’ve hit our fair city, or are they a straight-ahead indie-rock/pop band, a la Superchunk, Spoon, and the like? Or, hell, are they some kind of psych-rock revival thing? As Afflictinitus spins, the band seems to manifest its multiple personalities at random on different tracks.

In reality, the band seems to live happily in all three of the aforementioned musical worlds at the same time, drifting beautifully like an Explosions in the Sky outtake on one track (“James Ralph Brown Part I”), pulling off a throwback to the mid-’90s indie-rock scene on another (the Buffalo Tom-esque “Nightmare,” “Timing Out”), and coming off like a trippier retro-rock band on a third (“Cornman”; holy freakin’ Pink Floyd, y’all…). And it’s good. I mean, “good” as in “really good,” like “damn, I wonder how long it’ll take these kids to find their way onto some hipster indie label” good. (Anybody from Thirty Ghosts Recs reading this? You Jagjaguwar folks?) This is some wonderfully sublime, drift-off-in-a-painkiller-induced-haze-type music that makes me kick myself for not having seen the Tiffs live in the year or three they’ve been around.

My one quibble is that while I dearly love the opening track (the aforementioned “James Ralph Brown Part I”) on its own merits — I dig those brightly-drifting “Texas”-sounding but still shimmery guitars — it kind of does a disservice to the rest of Afflictinitus to stick a meandering instrumental up-front, even when it’s a good one. The Riff Tiffs don’t truly kick into gear ’til the second half of “James Ralph Brown Part II,” once the song mutates from EitS-style melancholy into an Elephant 6-tinged pop-rock track (one that practically shrieks “your favorite Austin band!”) and then subsequently surges back skyward near the close.

From then on through the end of the album, the momentum stays strong, all the way through the appropriately Rogue Wave-ish “In My Brain (There Are Waves)” and the gentle, sweet, proto-emo dynamics of “Snow” to finisher “Sailor’s Scorn,” which does the swirl/sway thing quite nicely before building to some gorgeously majestic choruses. The songs drift in and out, sailing along on beds of static and classic rock-tinged guitars, coalescing every once in a while to allow singer/guitarist Chris Rehm to yelp out some words over the top.

The more I listen, the less I care about the genre-jumping, instead feeling more and more impressed at the Riff Tiffs’ ability to switch from blissed-out spaciness to full-on rawk at the drop of a hat and still make it feel like the most natural thing in the world. Whatever kind of music I think the Tiffs are making, it really doesn’t matter; it’s obvious that they know how it should all go, on a gut level, and neat-and-tidy boxes be damned. Let the guitars crash and soar, let the drums lull you into a head-nodding trance, let the trippy, not quite sensical lyrics bob around in your consciousness, and just trust the kids. They know exactly what they’re doing.