Alkari, Kublai Khan EP

Some days, it can be damn difficult to pin down a band that doesn’t fit in any kind of neat scenesterized box. What are you, if you’re not nu-New Wave, screamo, post-punk, metalcore, or space-rock? Just guitars and drums and a voice — what the hell’s that, these days?

That’s where I am with Alkari. On their Kublai Khan EP, they present the picture of a rock band that’s just that, with no prefixes or suffixes; just “rock.” There are elements of plenty of different sub-genres scattered throughout, certainly — like the math-y bits in “GG249,” or the retro-sounding middle bit in the title track — but those elements never define the band itself.

So what I’m left with, instead, is five songs to try to use to puzzle the band out. And as puzzles go, Kublai Khan is one I don’t mind listening to repeatedly to try to piece together. Alkari start off with “GG249,” where their warmly fuzzed-out guitars make me think of Superdrag, and I’m impressed that they manage to mesh piano in with the guitars without coming off like some sort of cheesy lounge-rock band; it’s a difficult trap to avoid.

“The Code” ups the ante by a heck of a lot — it’s yearning and anthemic, grand in that way that Arcade Fire songs are, where you know the band’s singing about something bigger and more meaningful than tiny, insignificant little you, even if you can’t pin down just what it is. If I had to namecheck somebody, I’d say Doves; Alkari have the same kind of arena-rock-but-not-detached feel to their music, at least on this song, and the same sense of urgency besides.

“If I Could,” though, the EP’s midpoint, is probably the true centerpiece. While I find myself liking “The Code” more, it feels like a fluke compared to “If I Could” — this is what this band really, truly sounds like. The guitars are fucking awesome, in particular, thick and substantial and almost bluesy at times. Plus, there’s a warm, friendly, unpretentious sound to the whole thing, like it tumbled out of some long-forgotten Twin/Tone vault somewhere. And hey, that could work, come to think of it; slap some Replacements on after these middle two tracks, and you might be fooled into thinking it was ’80s Minneapolis all over again.

Sadly, the EP staggers downhill after that. “Kublai Khan” starts promisingly, with a nice riff that repeats later, but then speeds up into relatively standard bar-band rock and never really comes back. It sounds retro at points, although not in a particularly good way, like the band’s playing a song it only remembers halfway from the band members’ collective youth. There are weird washes of synths at times, too, that don’t really seem to fit and kind of disrupt the proceedings. Closer “Jayco Michobay” improves, but not by a whole lot — the band ventures into electronica territory with murky atmospherics, burbling synths, and clicking drums, and while they’re not bad when the song cranks into full-on rock mode later, they never really recover.

But hey, I can live with it — it’s an EP, and it’s a start, and these guys have a hell of a lot of potential. For “The Code” and “If I Could” (and, to a lesser extent, “GG249”), I’ll happily overlook the second half of the disc. Three out of five ain’t bad, particularly when the good side’s that good.