When you hear the melancholic “Till Dead,” the first track on Boxing Twilight, you might assume that Midstates hails from across the pond, but the soft-spoken, understated lyrics and lush synthesizers are straight out of the Midwest. Chicago’s Midstates delivers shoe-gazer, electro-pop with fatigued, almost mumbled, vocals over bubbly keyboards and snappy percussion. This Midwestern modesty could be taken as part of Midstates’ allure, but not if you were hoping for passion instead of passivity.
While Boxing Twilight is pleasant enough, it falls short of being really memorable. It’s like the tracks are coated with a layer of waxy film that dulls their potential for color and brightness. So when the guitars and keys are more prominent than the vocals on some tracks, the result is that the vocals feel weighed down or buried. Even the best songs seem burdened and unable to leap out and declare themselves. True, Boxing Twilight is still pretty sharp for having been recorded in a home studio, but I can’t help wanting better sound and more energy.
You do get a little taste of Midstates’ potential toward the middle of the album. “Us Explode” is the juicy center of a tight three-song package that starts with “Issues Today” and ends with “Destroy Them Anyway.” Each of these makes a strong bid for your affections, especially “Destroy Them Anyway,” which swells into a multi-tiered sing-along jam. And when “Us Explode” builds from a carefully paced, quiet plea to an argumentative lover (We’re all through / we don’t need to fight anymore) into a synth-dance breakdown, you’ll be hard pressed to control your urge to geek out to the bouncy beats.
After many go-rounds, the same three tracks are still the gems on this disc, while the rest of the songs, however nice, sort of bleed into the back of your mind, a pleasant, yet mostly unremarkable, low drone. Album closer “Favorite Television Show” does draw you back in at the last minute with a skillfully beautiful guitar intro and dreamy ooh-ah harmonies, but the preceding songs were just mildly catchy filler. Perhaps my attention lagged because “Passed for Promotion” went on for so long with its keyboard-noodling that by the time I got to “Either Way,” which has definite merits in its Granddaddy-esque bleeps and bloops, I was all zoned out like I’d just woken up from a particularly satisfying nap.
That said, Boxing Twilight could still turn out to be one of those slow-burner albums that you’ll soon lose among the stacks of CDs in your bedroom and then one day pull out for another spin and discover the hooks that failed to sink in during those first few listens. It could happen.
For more info see: midstatesmusic.com
