Monster of Soft Rock

You might expect a band named Grand Archives to be a strictly
preservationist project, but while the Seattle
quartet do maintain
a certain vintage folk-rock sound, they aren’t above forgetting the past—questions about or
comparisons to singer/guitarist Mat Brooke’s former bands Carissa’s
Wierd and Band of Horses are dismissed with understandable
antipathy—or even abandoning an entire album’s worth of
material.

“We had written a whole slew of songs for this record that were
really upbeat and generally focused toward a live audience, which is
fun and all, but once we got it down on tape, it sounded really
contrived and phony,” says Brooke. “Like we were trying to be something
we weren’t. We made the choice to scrap it and start over from scratch,
[and] it was actually really relieving.”

The result of this scrapping and starting over is the band’s
sophomore full-length for Sub Pop, Keep in Mind Frankenstein.
The record bears all the band’s familiar traits—hushed singing
and instrumentation, an occasional and slight country twang, plenty of
reverb, unshowy but enveloping four-part harmonies—its overall
sound falling somewhere in between the intimate, often somber
arrangements of their debut four-song demo EP and their bigger,
brighter self-titled album.

“When we made the demo, we really weren’t sure if anyone would give
a shit, and it really took a lot of the pressure off,” recalls Brooke.
“Then, when we made the first record, we were really going for a big
sound so people would give a shit. Now, with this record, we kind of
just made it the way we wanted and let it just be whatever it was.”

Despite having to write and rehearse a whole new batch of songs
while in the recording studio, sometimes arranging lyrics and vocal
parts just before rolling tape, Brooke found the album-making process
to be relatively easy.

“The recording was a lot smoother on this record,” he says. “Just in
the sense that we are starting to get a lot more confident with each
other’s playing styles, strengths and weaknesses, that sort of thing.
It’s becoming a lot more intuitive and less rigid.”

It’s a smooth-sounding record, as well. In fact, it’s almost
entirely frictionless—the brief record has barely left a mark on
me after several listens. It begins with “Topsy’s Revenge,” Brooke
slowly intoning over a few spare, low-humming cello notes and a simple,
echoing melody on toy piano and guitar. There’s a moment in the song,
just after the first chorus around the 1:08 mark, when you get the
fleeting feeling that things are about to break wide open, that the
song is about to kick into high gear and at least mildly rock
out—that’s what might have happened on their first
album—but then it just slouches into another pretty, whisper-soft
sighing verse, building up to the gently insistent, harmonized refrain
of “Some day I will come back and burn it all down.” Following track
“Witchy Park/Tomorrow Will (Take Care of Itself)” reveals another
subtly persistent chorus in its second half, and things pick up to an
easy trot with “Silver Among the Gold.” From there on out, it’s a
procession of one way-understated chorus after another, highlights
being the sun-downing slide-guitar-accented “Oslo Novelist” (which
features guest vocals from fellow former Carissa’s Wierdo and current S
singer/songwriter Jenn Ghetto), the slow-aching “Left for All the
Strays,” and the funereal jamboree of “Dig That Crazy Grave.”

Frankenstein sits well with a lot of the soft-rocking,
’70s-styled folk stuff that’s taken popular hold of Seattle these days
(and, as is often the case with these things, was taking hold of other,
bigger scenes at least a year or two ago). But, like a lot of this
music to my ears, the album sounds great, gorgeous
even—lovingly and carefully crafted, well played and
produced—but it doesn’t always pack the most memorable of songs.
(Although, this is coming from a crank who thought the band’s
self-titled full-length failed to live up to the charm of their
demo).

But if Frankenstein‘s all a bit underwhelming, if you’re left
wondering what might have been had the band not ditched those
apparently more rocking songs, there may be hope for you yet. Of those
discarded songs, Brooke says: “It always seems like when you are
embarrassed of something you created, you look back on it later and
realize that you actually like it. So I don’t know, [but] I’d imagine
somehow it will all surface at some point. For better or worse.”