Please Quiet Ourselves Please Quiet Ourselves by: Dan Osmolowski Tue:05-Feb-08 Label: Mushpot Year: 2007 WB rating 40 out of 100

Imagine this, if you will: you are in your teens and a member of an indie-pop band. Someone, somehow, decides that your music is good enough to record, package and promote. You have, maybe, a couple of songs that are pretty good, a few that could do with some incubation and refinement and quite a number that should never be committed to tape but you are too young and headstrong to acknowledge it. Years later, you deal with another ungrateful customer in some dead-end excuse for a job and wonder, “where did it all go wrong?” There can be many answers to that question but let’s limit the responses to addressing how it could go horribly awry for young Californian six piece, Please Quiet Ourselves.

Recorded only a short time after the band’s members graduated from high school, their self-titled debut album is a patchwork of lightweight pop that has been heavily influenced by the luminaries of the independent American scene; a fact openly acknowledged by Please Quiet Ourselves’ promotional blurb. The band are at their most interesting when aping Pavement (the latter half of ‘Minors vs Majors’), Broken Social Scene (‘Sunburn’), Yo La Tengo (‘Say I Won’t’) or Modest Mouse (‘The Light’). This alone is not necessarily a bad or particularly unusual thing for a band starting out; it is, however, a significant obstacle when trying to evaluate a band on its own merits and not those of artists who have been fortunate enough to possess the talent and bravery to blaze trails themselves (even on their debut records).

First albums aside, the real crux of the issue does not reside in the fact that Please Quiet Ourselves mimic other artists, it is that when they attempt to ‘do their own thing’, they often sound astringently woeful. From verse to chorus, songs are often stitched together in a manner not unlike Frankenstein’s monster; ‘Antibodies’ and ‘I Don’t Care’ threaten to disintegrate at any given moment under the weight of hesitant chord shifts, tedious riffs and bloated guitar histrionics. Vocalist and chief songwriter, Jojo Brandel, sounds out of time and hopelessly out of tune throughout the majority of the record. Sometime vocalist, Maddie Tien, appears on the album’s high point, opener ‘Color Chart’, and embarrasses Brandel with an engaging, quirky and alluring performance. Lyrically, this - the band’s oldest song (written while the members were still in high school) - is about as interesting as things get on the record; the fact that it is a simple tome to the presence of colours on a chart should give a fair indication as to the quality of the rest of Brandel’s narratives.

Please Quiet Ourselves are best when in an understated and, coincidently, quiet frame of mind. ‘Sunburn’, ‘Color Chart’ and ‘The Light’ all benefit from acoustic guitar, flourishes of xylophone, melodic horn and muted percussion. These moments all point to a brighter future where cringe-worthy moments of bombast and the tendency to shift tangents within the confines of one song give way to a convergence towards creating a warm, focused atmosphere.

Not many musicians can lay claim to their first album being the best in their catalogue but where there are assertions and arguments for this to be the case, those albums have had a singular focus; they have benefited from judicious editing and a ruthless decision making process that threshes the figurative chaff from the seed. More importantly, history’s great debut albums show promise and a definitive talent or desire to make a statement that is original and vital. Please Quiet Ourselves is a long way from that, but if some of that immaturity and musical over-exuberance falls away, number two may just be worth the ride.