With the recent success of artists like Fun., Kimbra, and Neon Trees, the music market is starting to feel a little overloaded with quirky indie pop. Which makes Beware and Be Grateful, the latest release from Chicago experimental rockers Maps & Atlases, a small breath of fresh air—the band’s jangly guitars, lo-fi percussion, and bubbly vocals set them apart in a sea of homogenous synthesizers. Unfortunately, though, Beware’s splintering components do not meld into a cohesive album, and the resulting album is significantly less than the sum of its parts.
The album shows promise with opener “Old and Gray.” The lyrics are elegant—vocalist Dave Davidson sweetly sings “When you are old and gray/ I hope that someone holds you the way I would”—and the multilayered backing harmonies develop a feel reminiscent of Bon Iver. But though the song sounds great the first time, it loses its value soon afterwards, as the listener becomes disenchanted with its catchy guitar riffs and harmonies and realizes how painfully overdone the instrumentation really is. This feeling persists for nearly every song on the record. In what seems to be an active effort to mold into the sound delivered by many of its contemporaries, Maps & Atlases delivers tracks that are forced-folksy and overly cheesy, like “Winter” and “Silver Self.”
The main problem that plagues this album is that guitars, percussion, and samples obfuscate good ideas. As a result, there is an apparent lack of continuity within each song, as well as on the album as a whole. “Be Three Years Old,” which sounds like a bad Vampire Weekend knockoff, exemplifies the lack of blend and, ultimately, makes many of the songs quite unmemorable.
The innovation that the band delivered in the past, however, is still discernable in a few tracks, which should keep fans hopeful for their future releases. On “Fever,” we find one of the only examples of a song where the little things—a tempo in flux, soft but steady percussion—come together wonderfully to deliver an anthemic tune that stands above the rest of the album’s songs.
Though it is apparent that Maps & Atlases is trying to get away from its harder-to-listen-to roots, the band falls incredibly short on Beware and Be Grateful. On what could have been a great record, the hodge-podge of musical components gets lost in translation, and lacks the re-playability that makes catchy indie rock so successful. Although the LP delivers a bunch of fun songs that you can tap your foot along to at an Urban Outfitters, that’s about all we can expect from this album.
Voice’s Choices: “Fever,” “Important”
