Album Review :: Restorations :: LP3

Written by: Andrea Janov, CC2K Music Editor

Restorations :: LP3 :: SideOneDummy

This album psyches you up itself. The first two minutes of LP3 are instrumental. The music sets the tone and lures you in, by the time the lyrics start you are begging for a release.

On the first listen to this album, I just let it wash over me. Beginning to end, I let it carry me through its journey. Then on the second and third listens I let it do it again. I was well into my fourth listen when I realized that I really had to rein myself in so I could write about it.

Man, “signature sound” sounds so cheesy, but Restorations has one. I have never read a band sound like them – they are definitely descendants of The Replacements and Hot Water Music, yet nothing like them at all. This alum is everything that we have come to love about Restorations – simply extended and heightened.

This is not an album that was meant to be dissected track by track or note by note. It was meant to be listened to as whole, each track building on the one before. It is gruff and gravely and visceral and sensual. There are chorus that you will want to sing along and thrash to the beat, while the verses absorb you. They know just how to strip a song down to expose what is raw and vulnerable about it, and have that element directly connect with the listener.

Each song has its own sound, its own personality, its own message that it is staining to get out. From the music that just encapsulates you to the lyrics that knock you over, you realize just how carefully constructed and balanced each song and in turn, the whole album is. If we were to remove the music, these songs could simply be called poems.

The give and take that is created in Separate Songs creates a beautiful tension. The music oscillates between sparse and totally rock and roll. There are sections when the music is able to take on its own personality and run, but once the vocals reenter the song, the music is reined in and supports beautifully.  All My Home is has a haunting ambiance and No Castel has a hard opening that pushed this album into a whole other space.

Though there is a great use of feedback used throughout the record, it is simply so fitting as the ending. Just as bands end sets with the feedback screaming into the silent room, LP3 announces is conclusion in the same way. It winds down and decomposed until it is pure noise, and you are left in the static.