Springfield Riots, Say When

Springfield Riots’ debut EP, Say When, is a bit of an odd duck of an album, in that it rides a line between sweet, Pet Sounds-esque melodies and murky, downcast melancholy; you’ll get a track like opener “Hope and Envy,” which is sweet and languid, with an awesomely shy romanticism to it, and you’ll be bobbing your head along and singing with the repeated verses until about halfway through the song, when it hits you how damn sad the whole thing is. Vocalist/guitarist Pedro sings that one day he and the object of his crush will be together and happy, but there’s an undercurrent of depressed resignation beneath the words, like he doesn’t truly believe that that’s what’ll eventually happen.

Really, that happy/sad dichotomy defines most of Say When — it mashes together beautiful, masterfully-crafted melodies and warm, scruffy, occasionally retro-Floydian guitars with sometimes-elegaic keys and Pedro’s echoey, across-the-room vocals for music that’s both bright and uncertain, hopeful but afraid, and romantic as hell throughout. The vocals, in particular, give Say When a strange watery feel, kind of a bubbling, distant vibe, like you’re moving through a warm, gently bobbing ocean and listening to the sound come out of the water. The combination of sounds works wonderfully on most of the album tracks, and even on the ones where things stumble a bit (see the verse of “Mixtape Melody,” which gets a bit clumsy; when the chorus slams in, though, I forget all about it), it’s never catastrophic. These guys definitely know their way around a pop song.

I will admit, though, that one of my two favorite tracks here, “Hollow Romance,” sounds nothing like any of the rest of what I’ve heard by these guys. It staggers and lurches beneath an overarching canopy of somber organ and ethereal “woo-oo” backing vocals, like a weepy drunk crashing the doors of a church to pass out on the hard, cold stone floor in front of the altar. The track’s weirdly psych-gospel, more reminiscent of something on a Paris Falls album than what you’d expect to find here, but holy fuck is it good. Pedro sounds perfectly tortured and bitter (yet still resigned to his fate), the rhythm section stutter-stomps along, simultaneously loose and woozy and tight and driving, and the guitars are fuzzed-out and low-key, only stepping to the forefront when absolutely necessary.

Just when I’m starting to feel uncertain of my initial impression of Springfield Riots, of course, they swing back towards the poppier, janglier side of things with the sweet, swooning “Last Night,” and close out with my other favorite track, “Party Violence,” which cribs part of the melody from “Hope and Envy” and grafts it to a xylophone-accented melody and nicely shoegazer-y feel. The drums take center stage briefly here, propelling the song forward in the choruses, while Pedro’s Britpop-ish vocals soar above, the keys dance off to the sides, and the guitars both roar and surge distantly and jangle up-close ’til it all crumbles to a close.