Taking 30 song foundations into the studio, improvising upon them, and then whittling down a double album's worth of material to 13 tracks that fly under the four-minute mark,
Oxford Collapse's fourth album and second for Sub Pop finds them replacing the clean sheen provided by John Agnello on
Remember the Night Parties with a rough-and-tumble, spontaneous vibe. Recorded by Eric Emm (
Don Caballero) and Chad Matheny in numerous New York spaces, the Brooklyn boys maintain their hipster sensibilities and flip between speedy grit and sweetheart pop, with varied results. Presumably, when the bandmembers picked their handful of songs to be used, they went straight for either their most straightforward alt-rock numbers or for their more ambitious ideas. This leaves the record uneven, with the trio at its best when sticking to raw jangling numbers, '80s left-of-center ditties, and '90s indie/alternative rockers in the styles of
Superchunk and
Sloan. "Electric Arc," "Young Love Delivers," and especially "The Birthday Wars" are prime examples of their muscular-but-sweet fuzz pop, and make for some career classics, but curve balls into cutesy territory like the cello-violin-vocal ballad "A Wedding" come off as experimental just for the sake of trying something different. Some of the gambles work out, like when they tear a page out of the
Apples in Stereo songbook for "Featherbeds," or build on a staccato woodpecker beat with airy vocals and orchestral flourishes in "B-Roll," but
Oxford shine brightest when they stick to what they know best: simple axe-wielding, wood-splintering, college rock jams. ~ Jason Lymangrover