Caught in the Carousel

Saint Bernadette

In the Ballroom
Exotic Records

As suggested by its title, Saint Bernadette's debut album, In the Ballroom, is a little... well... retro. It's true that, somewhat fortunately for the listener, the album skips past shoddy rip-off revivals of new wave and "disco" to channel even earlier musical eras. However, though the band's MySpace page (www.myspace.com/saintbernadette) suggests that the band's style hails back to the 1960s, Saint Bernadette's influences seem to come from all over the place. Not strictly ballroom, the band's pointed-yet-strong vocal stylings come off a little like those of a lounge singer--if the album weren't so cleanly edited, the listener could almost hear the smoke in the air. Dashes of Lloyd Cole-style alt-country appear in "Such Ease," and the synth bits in "Universe" bring the album right back to the contemporary. This musical mishmash is certainly more pleasant than the efforts of the average buzz band, but it's not very memorable. Strong vocals against a melodic backdrop are all fine and good, but they've been done before, and any band that's going to play the melody game needs to find new ways to make their work memorable for their listeners. It's not an impossible task--one can, for example, undercut melody with vocoder and banjo (as Broken Social Scene did on the Julie Penner-fronted "Anthem For A Seventeen-Year-Old Girl"), or pair three-part harmony with a synth that sounds like steel drums (as Delays did on the opening track of their debut album). Given the different touches scattered all over In the Ballroom, Saint Bernadette seem aware of all the options but they never quite follow through with any of them. It's almost like they can't completely decide what they want to be. They clearly have the tools to be as smooth as, say, Stereophonics, but they ultimately end up sounding more like Tracey Thorn. As a result, In the Ballroom works fantastically as background music, but you're highly likely to forget it later.

—Christine Fort