Austinist Album Review: Saturday Looks Good To Me's Cold Colors
Even for a five-song EP, Cold Colors flies by. The title track is a deconstructive bit of tape hiss experimentalism that calls to mind the sleepier moments of Gastr Del Sol’s catalog - an anticlimactic, befuddling way to open an EP. The in-and-out, formless pieces of sound soon give way to the more traditional, acoustic guitar number “Drink My Blood.” The song hardly a chance to introduce itself before the stoned-sounding “Illuminated Circles Dream of Backwards Running Vampires” continues along the same fragmented lines. And though the more focused and pretty “Vampires” leaves more of an imprint, it, too, ends just as it arrives. The triptych concludes with “Idiots,” chidingly and repetitively referencing “idiots standing in line” that shuts down before giving way to the EP’s closer, “Spiderbite,” which moves from a gentle string-laden number into a dense noise jam complete with tribal drums that mark the album’s first real stab at percussion. The layers of sound are impressive technically, but no great joy.
Snippets of thoughtful acoustic ditties slapped together with mismatched, experimental collages – that and the fact that “Illuminated Circles Dream of Backwards Running Vampires” has the melancholy touch of “Favorite T,” it’s like Saturday Looks Good to Me are walking in the shoes of the Lemonheads’ Evan Dando, who also flirted with clever pop structure (“Into Your Arms”) while alternately testing his audience’s patience with the faux-art frenzy of songs like “The Jello Fund.” While Saturday Looks Good to Me don’t misfire as much as Dando did, they barely give themselves the opportunity to succeed, either, failing to explore the more positive moments peeking out on the Cold Colors EP and content instead to close up shop prematurely. Were this Saturday Looks Good To Me’s principal statement this past year, it’d be a let-down. Instead, they turned to K Records for the more definitive Fill Up the Room, leaving Cold Colors as a curious statement of the band’s less palatable leanings. It’s interesting, sure, but mostly for devotees of this band’s sound. For the rest of us, the album waxes and wanes with little to recommend it over any other experimental pop release this side of unordinary.
