The Minor Leagues
North College Hill
Datawaslost Records

Link: http://minorleaguesmusic.com/

First, a caveat I’m from the decaying musical black hole of Cincinnati, the same city that The Minor Leagues hail from. Granted, I haven’t been to a show in a bit due to work, school, internship, etc. Too many bands from the Queen City are just terrible and waaay too many are college kids playing ’90s alternateen music covers to drunken college kids. Don’t get me wrong, there are fantastic and often overlooked gems that exist now and that have sadly faded away (including every totally awesome gnarly cool band I’ve ever played in). But we aren’t known as a mecca for great original music. This is part of why The Minor Leagues struck me like a sucker punch at an art gallery. There is little precedence for Cincinnati to have produced such a unique and fantastic sound, much less on an album.

North College Hill, named after a small city to the north of Cincinnati, is one of the few gems. 24 hours worth of perfect pop harmonies packed into 36-odd minutes sit nicely on top of mid-tempo indie pop guitars, drums, trumpets and bass. No overproduced sounds, no distorted guitars to cover a lack of training, no fast-paced drums to hide awkward silences, no vocal effects to make the singers sound like pre-teen robots. In short, it contains none of the apparent requirements of making a modern pop pièce de résistance. That’s French for “if there was a just god in the world, this album should be making the band a lot of money.”

The album features 10 tracks of roughly even length. Some are better than others, but there isn’t a bad song to be heard. Overall, the vocal harmonies stand out as the strongest aspect. It is crystal-clear that a lot of time went into the vocal melodies and harmonies; the mix of notes, textures and timing is near perfect. The music is well crafted; but the music seems to serve the role of a vehicle to carry the lyrics and vocals. Most of the album could be as strong if the music was completely removed. Some of the recurring themes include the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia, and melancholic observations of a crumbling neighborhood. Not the most positive topics but the bittersweet topics mesh well with the choral work present in most tracks.

There is a hypothetical point in the future that members of any band acknowledge when “every note and progression will have already been played.” To some extent this is a rationalization to allow a guitar pattern or drum fill or vocal melodies to sound a bit like (or even blatantly rip-off) other songs that have come before.  There is some truth to this notion as well, and ultimately serves to free the band up to make music that sounds great to them.

So it doesn’t detract from the quality of the album to say that there are many portions of the tracks on North College Hill that make me think of other bands and songs I’ve heard before. The male vocals on “Please Don’t Take me Love Away” sound like they could have been found on a b-side of a single from the True album from Spandau Ballet, and likewise for “Weekends are the Worst.” The vocal texture and range neatly match the tone of the New Romantic flavor of the New Wave school from 30 years ago. The vocals from  “Weekends” even borrows some of the twang of ’80s-era Elvis Costello. For those readers under 20, “New Wave” was what we old people called “alternative” electronic music.

“Home” is a swelling of a song, with repetitive lyrics and a crescendo of music churning around about for three minutes. Starting with simply vocals repeating, “you can’t go home, there is no home, you have no home” over and again, the band comes in slowly with acoustic guitars and drums and even xylophones for accents.

The least shiny song would be “1985 Forever.” The pieces of the song individually are fine, with minor-key arpeggios and bouncy bass lines streaming over-confident drums. The end product seems to be forced, like the band had a number of good pieces that were stitched together a bit haphazardly.

On the other side, “Secret Codes” is instant gold. Just press play and voila. The only problem with the song is that it is so short. The near-four minutes of the track cold go on for many times longer and still be as shiny and pretty as it is. The chorus “we live in secret codes” is perfectly balanced in parts, with three or more singers matching so well that it wouldn’t surprise me to know the band all had classical training. Towards the end of the song the band breaks into partial rounds to drag out the lyrics; also present are a number of backup vocals repeating the same words in accent form.

Easily the album of the year so far. Though it’s only February, the other submissions to ZapTown better bring their game faces to compete with North College Hill.