Pomegranates, Everything Is Alive

It’s often tempting to characterize an album with a season, especially when its qualities are so reminiscent of a particular time of year, and even more so if the album is released around the season it recalls. Pomegranates’ formal debut Everything Is Alive fills both these criteria for a “seasonal” album, released appropriately on the cusp of summer as the album seems to embody its spirit. Above all reasons that come to mind (the surf-rock influence, the breezy guitars), the sheer youthful enthusiasm the band exudes throughout the album is the main cause of correlation. Summer is, after all, a season enjoyed most by the young. (If you disagree with that statement, then more power to you, but when was the last time the boss gave you June and July off?)

The fatal flaw of Everything Is Alive, though, is that this exuberance is a smoke screen. Like many of the summer blockbusters that come to a theater near you each year, underneath all the loud noises and special effects, there isn’t a whole lot of substance. Beneath all of the band’s energy and “experimentalism,” there aren’t many reasons to listen to this record more than once or twice. At its core, Everything Is Alive sounds forced, an average collection of indie-pop songs much too easy to shrug off.

Pomegranates have already garnered more than a couple of Modest Mouse comparisons due to jaunty guitar work that could have been plucked from anywhere in MM’s discography up to The Moon & Antarctica. This is both a great compliment and an accurate connection, but the best thing Pomegranates have going for them is the one-two punch of vocalists Joey Cook and Isaac Karns. Cook’s high, child-like voice plays well off of Karns’ solid baritone, a contrast used most successfully on the exceptional closer “Thunder Meadow.” Karns sings at the beginning of the song like a man in disbelief, “I heard the voice from the grave / where you’re going is where I’ll be,” only to be reassured the voice was real by Cook over a playful guitar line and a soft, persistent bass drum thump. Cook sings with the earnest belief of a child, “I know you’re still not dead / no matter what they say.” It is unfortunate that Pomegranates choose to use this interplay on only three of the album’s ten full tracks, but it would be even more unfortunate if the other two songs featuring both singers weren’t so marginal.

If this album were a contest between Karns’ voice and Cook’s, I would have to declare Karns the winner, not so much due to some fault with the latter’s voice, but because Karns seems to be singing over the better songs. “Appreciations” explodes from the start with piano chords rumbling out from the left-hand side of the keys and an equally forceful drumbeat backing them, eventually giving way to a fragile one-off chorus that finds Karns nearly whispering over soft xylophone tinkering and drum sticks delicately clicking against a snare shell. “In The Kitchen”‘s sunny guitar work dances over the track as Karns promises, “when twilight calls / I’ll be home for dinner.” This sweet sentiment of devotion is offset on the next song by one of Joey Cook’s best moments, the rambunctious “Late Night Television.” “I don’t know where you’ve been / but I know that you’ve not been alone,” Cook sings over growling distortion, reflecting the wild-eyed paranoia of suspected infidelities.

There are two ways to look at the album: as a bad one and as a good one. Bad, because it’s ineffectual. Good, because it isn’t bad, just ineffectual. As you can tell by what you’ve just read, I’ve chosen to look at Everything Is Alive for what it is rather than what it should be, and what it is is functional indie-pop. Functionality is great if you’re talking about a doorknob, but when the term can be used to describe an album, it’s clear the band needs to go back to the drawing board. And Pomegranates may very well have a good record in them. Not all of their ideas on the album are bad; they just need to find a more interesting way to present them. As for now, though, they’ve only created songs that evoke indifference. If you were to walk up to me on the street and ask me what I thought of Everything Is Alive, I would simply reply that I don’t. A good album will have people talking about how good it is. A bad album will have people talking about how bad it is. But a forgettable album won’t have people saying much at all.