The Stills, Without Feathers

Okay, I’m a bit less panicked now. When I first threw Without Feathers, the sophomore effort from Montreal-dwelling indie-rockers the Stills into the CD player, I had this horrible feeling that the Alzheimer’s had finally begun to kick in. I mean, my memory’s not great on the best of days, and it’s gotten worse as I’ve gotten older — I’ve gone from being That Guy Who Can Quote Simpsons Episodes All Day Long to That Guy Who Can’t Remember What Floor He Parked His Car On in the Parking Garage — but seriously, this was scary. The album started, and as it rolled along I was getting more and more worried, wondering how in the hell it was that none of it sounded at all familiar to me. Surely I remembered some of Logic Will Break Your Heart, the band’s 2003 full-length? It’d been a while since the last listen, sure, but not that long, right? But nope, this was pretty damn foreign. Either I’d completely forgotten what the Stills sounded like, or something deeper and more far-reaching was going on.

Thankfully, it turned out to be the latter. The reason nothing on Without Feathers rang any bells is because, well, it sounds like a completely different band. The Stills who gave us the Strokes-ish urban rock of “Lola Stars and Stripes” and the Killers-a-year-early shimmer of “Love and Death” have meandered off over the horizon and come back totally changed men. Gone are the disco-ish beats, the jagged guitars, the New Wave-ish distance — it’s been replaced by something warmer, more down-to-earth, more friendly, somehow. I’m guessing the shift is partly due to the departure of guitarist Greg Paquet, which allowed drummer Dave Hamelin to jump to the guitars and really flex his songwriting muscle. Last time out all the songs were credited to the band as a whole, but on this disc Hamelin’s definitely taken the reins (if he didn’t have it before anyway; who knows?), writing or co-writing all but three songs, while the band’s shuffled in “new” keyboardist Liam O’Neil and replacement drummer Colin Brooks of Sea Ray. Really, the only things that’ve stayed static in the intervening years since Logic Will Break Your Heart are Tim Fletcher’s haunting, half-smiling vocals and Oliver Crowe’s stately bass.

Sonically, it feels like the Stills have taken a step further back along the rock timeline than a lot of their New-New Wave peers (although the band never really fit into that whole Interpol/Franz Ferdinand scene, to my mind), back to the earth-toned haze of ’70s roots-rock. There’re hints of Neil Young, The Band, Bruce Springsteen (see the Danny Federici-esque piano throughout), and even the less-prog bits of Supertramp all over the place, and two of the best tracks on here, “It Takes Time” and the smiling-but-threatening “Destroyer,” jump beyond even that to the glory days of Motown, incorporating some gorgeous horns and driving R&B beats for a cool groove with a sharp dollop of indie-kid sweetness dripped on top. There’s only one lonely throwback to the Logic Will Break Your Heart days, “Baby Blues,” and the band manages to inject some humanity into the sleek sheen even there, thanks partly to the delicate sneer of Emily Haines (Metric, Broken Social Scene). Beyond that one track, though, Without Feathers an organic, chaotic affair, from the gentle opener “In the Beginning,” which manages to truck along nonchalantly despite being about an unwieldy subject like, um, the creation of the universe, through “Helicopters,” which brings to mind late-period Superchunk, to the jaunty mess of “Oh Shoplifter,” which sounds like the Stills are playing the contents of a junk shop in the background. Where Logic was clean, Feathers is rough around the edges and scruffy — and stranger still, it doesn’t seem to mind.

Of course, such a drastic change is bound to throw off a fair chunk of the folks who swooned over Logic Will Break Your Heart just a few years back, and that’s unfortunate, because there’s a lot here to love. There aren’t as many out-and-out hooks as on Logic, it’s true, but there’s the building, Death Cab-gone-theatrical churn of “The Mountain,” the beautifully sparse relationship elegy of “She’s Walking Out,” the aforementioned “It Takes Time” and “Destroyer,” and even the melancholy Pink Floyd-ish piano pop of “In the End.” Without Feathers is a slow burner of an album, maybe, but it’s also a much more mature, fully realized pile of songs than the Stills’ previous stuff. I still love Logic, certainly, but I’m very glad I was able to take the time to let Without Feathers sink in, as well.