JULY 2008 ONLINE EDITORIALS

The Lost Decade - Western Anxiety

By Nathan Harper

You only get one promising debut record – after that, if you’re still promising then you’re just some band. And so Fort Collins trio The Lost Decade have released theirs, Western Anxiety, a rocker built on almost parabolic loud-quiet-dynamics. The songs start soft and then after near vertical flight from introspective to thundering, explode at the apogee before descending back to mellow, and a smooth fade out. Musically, the band’s Tool, Radiohead and shoegaze-metal influences come through in spades, but it is The Lost Decades’ wanting to have it both ways sonically that evokes the strongest memories of the late 90s rock these boys were reared on.

When guitarist/vocalist Rob Alexander’s voice is soft, it’s almost gossamer, a delicate thing, fragile through your speakers, and when the band turns the corner to punishing, as they do on almost every track, his screams grow guttural and the drums move from placid beat-keeping to a double-kick attack that could lure an unsuspecting concertgoer into a mosh pit. Though the song structure proves predictable at times, the band handles the dynamics well, both clean and screamed vocals have tone and punch, and the rhythm section transfers from their two modes fairly seamlessly.

If their sound is to work for a second record I suspect the band will mix more of the eclecticism found in many of their intros in throughout entire songs, allowing for more ideas to be expressed, but until then, Western Anxiety works well as an interesting if not always unforeseen rollercoaster ride of a hard rock album.