The Eastern Sea, EP II

When I first heard The Eastern Sea, it was in a live setting, with all guns blazing, and the band turned the club into a grinning, sweaty hoedown/tent revival, ending by inviting everybody in the crowd up on the stage to dance and sing. And it was pretty amazing. The recorded experience, however, is a little different — there’s less of the all-out energy, the unabashed joy, evident on the band’s two EPs (the self-titled debut and this one here, somewhat unobtrusively titled EP II), which is to be somewhat expected without the live dynamic between the band and their audience.

What you get on EP and EP II, instead, is essentially one intricately-crafted song cycle about love and a girl and, um, I’ve got no idea what else. It’s playful, yet smart as hell, and possibly more deliberate and thought-out than any set of songs I’ve heard in a long time; listening to tracks like “The Sea” and “Your House,” you can’t help but believe guitarist/singer/primary songwriter Matthew Hines knew exactly what he wanted these two EPs to sound like and bent the instruments and equipment to his will until it all clicked into place. Everything fits right where it needs to be, from that mournful horn line over there to the half-desperate backing vocals over here; Hines isn’t writing songs, he’s composing pop symphonies, Brian Wilson-style.

And yes, it’s amazing. That’s the only word I can come up with that’ll encompass the whole thing, and I can’t say it enough; I can literally listen to this band play for days on end, in part because my ear’ll find some new little piece to focus in on each and every time I listen. Sonically, it’s beautifully serene, warm and close-sounding, with the mostly-gentle guitars moving up to stand next to you while they play their part and Hines tells his stories into your ear on the other side. The bass, drums, and assorted other instrumentation meanwhile busies itself in the near distance, always within the room but set somewhat apart.

I’d worried after the debut EP came out, back in 2008, that there’d be no way Hines and company could ever match up to it, but they’ve blown my fears right out of the water with EP II. They start off with the jaunty, low-slung “The Mountain,” a sing-song-y piece of traveling indie-pop that’s insistent, sincere, and addictive as hell, and it immediately feels like I just finished listening to EP and have merely moved on to the next song. Hines meanders through the music, coming off like the internal musings of some mostly-contented roadtripper out riding the freeways.

If I hadn’t heard second track “The Sea” before, on a split-7″ The Eastern Sea did with Houstonian bros News on the March, I’ll admit that it might’ve thrown me off, just because it’s so different from anything else I’ve heard from the band so far. There were bleak, melancholy tracks on EP, to be sure, but none of them approached the level of spooky, unsettling isolation channeled here — there’s some kind of a story being built about a house situated on a constantly-eroding beach, and the music washes appropriately in and out, inexorable as the tide, and as it rolls along it becomes apparent that it’s all a mirage, crumbled away when the sun comes up. The narrator (I’m not going to assume it’s Hines himself) starts out reveling in the cut-off, out-of-touch nature of the beach life but ends up trapped and alone. Add to that the eerie, Radiohead-esque descending riff the chorus rides, and the end result is a song that’s both pretty and sinister at once.

Thankfully, the band lifts the mood somewhat with the cheery, fuzzy-edged “The Name,” which reminds me of the best stuff old-school Austin indie-pop guys Silver Scooter ever came up with. It’s a toe-tapping, head-nodding joy of a song, one worth hearing on repeat all by itself; I love everything from the overfuzzed guitars and near-shoegazer melody to the cheeky lyrics: “Tell me your name / I swear I’ll drop it whenever I can / If you’re using mine / I’m pretty sure people know who I am.” Closer “Your House” turns things down again and gets more melancholy and somber, with the narrator addressing (presumably) the girl he loves on the eve of her/their departure, although it’s never clear whether he’s actually saying these things to her or just thinking them and wishing he could speak them aloud.

The song moves along subtly, led by brushed, low-key drums and horns and by Hines’ mournful, almost Christopher Cross-ish voice (I know, I know, but I don’t mean that in a bad way, just that both voices have this strangely gentle feel to them), as the two people involved make their quiet drive to wherever it is they’re going. The track’s sweet and poignant, saying just enough to keep you interested but never giving it all away…and then, before you know it, it’s over, and you still want more. Put together, the two EPs do indeed complete one another, but hopefully that just means they’re one complete beginning for The Eastern Sea, not an ending. If we’re lucky, these folks will demolish my expectations yet again.