Skip to main content[ALT-COUNTRY] Celilo could be a really fantastic rock band. The Portland sextet could sear listeners' ears with unholy riffage and leave their teeth rattling with epic drum fills. It gets so close to doing just that: One can hear the coil tightening on songs like Bending Mirrors' opening track, "Easter Lily." The band builds up to the edge of a total rock assault, priming listeners with an eager drumroll. Then, as if surveying the slopes of Awesome Rock-Out Mountain and finding them too steep to traverse, Celilo pulls back with some muted Pink Floyd atmospherics and a pretty slide-guitar whine.
Good for Celilo. I've spent years asking this alt-country act to dive into distorted guitar squeals and pummeling guitar licks. Bending Mirrors proves I'm not only barking up the wrong tree, but barking the wrong bark. These guys shouldn't change a thing.
It's not just that frontman Sloan Martin has progressed as a lyricist (he has), or that the band has tightened (it has); it's that Bending Mirrors nails the band's tone right on the head. In the past, Celilo's album production seemed to dull the impact of what the players were doing. Though the band rarely rocks out, there's potential for explosiveness in all of Celilo's full-band songs, and to hear that interplay softened by too clean a production style always seemed like a shame.
On Bending Mirrors, Celilo and co-producer Mike Coykendall manage to bring the band's strengths—it's on-a-dime melodic turnarounds; the tenderness in Martin's lisp-laden vocals; the pop of Kipp Crawford's snare—to the foreground. A ghostly shaker drives "Clatter of Hooves," where a tasteful spaghetti-western bass tone does nothing to distract from the delicacy of the song's finger-picked acoustic guitar and warped, twinkling keys. The boy-girl harmonies (courtesy of Annalisa Tornfelt) and playful slide guitar on "Pink Sofa" make for a knee-slapping retreat from an otherwise heavy album. And Coykendall gets extra credit for playing distorted guitar on the album's rawest sequence, the crushing breakdowns of "Sirens of Metropolis."
Because the production carries Celilo's songs, it's more evident than ever what a worthy songwriter Sloan Martin is. The words have always been solid and visual, but his comfort level with his own phrasing and content is more convincing than ever. On "Piñata," Martin packs more into the verses than should really fit, but it comes off as conversational and endearing. On "Bush Pilot," he sings: "The heart's a motel, with too many rooms, and doors that won't shut all the way." The metaphor continues from there, perhaps going a line too far. But we don't mind Martin taking us there. He, and his band, have earned our ears.
Celilo releases Bending Mirrors at Mississippi Studios Thursday, March 19, with the Physical Hearts and the Woolwines. 9 pm. $8. 21+.
WWeek 2015