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In Ear Park
Rating: 7.4 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
By Rick Sieber
How best to make sense of one’s past? With In Ear Park, Department of Eagles (Daniel Rossen and Fred Nicolaus) opt to sit down and have a heart-to-heart conversation with it. Needless to say, the results aren’t always pretty. Articulated in fits and starts, the album’s somewhat confrontational dialogue challenges a past that is by turns oppressively dictatorial (“Phantom Other”) and stubbornly silent (“Herring Bone”). Always intensely personal, these songs illuminate the ambivalence of looking backward, the pull towards intensely mixed emotions, the deceptiveness of memory. The music, on the other hand, is uniformly lovely: shimmering indie folk with enough classical touches (piano, cello) to give the sense of timelessness such bittersweet nostalgia requires. This motif is made explicit in “Classical Records,” where the singer wonders what forgotten truths of childhood lay languishing amidst the dusty records that no one seems to play anymore. Despite the insular tone of the record, this isn’t merely a stuffy exercise in nazel-gazing; there may be a frequently unsettling restlessness to the drifting melodies, but Rossen enlists a few of his Grizzly Bear bandmates to flesh out the arrangements with the sort of lush expansiveness his more famous band is known for. The result is still a challenging listen at times -- stark, emotional, restless – but for those looking to come to terms with a puzzling youth, Department of Eagles offer up enough prettiness to soften a few of that process’s inevitable emotional blows. (4AD)
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