Given its bustling and complex arrangements, the title of the new album by Controlling the Famous is appropriately metropolitan.
Like rush hour on a Los Angeles freeway, there's little room to move on "Automatic City," with tracks packed end to end and knotty guitar lines, interwoven vocal melodies and surging bass and drumming that would make an octopus' arms tired.
Unfortunately, the album has another thing in common with the grind of urban traffic — monotony. Throughout the 10 tracks on "Automatic City," the members of Controlling the Famous favor their instrumental virtuosity over songcraft. As a result, all 10 songs just blend together into an indistinguishable mass.
While not systematic enough to be considered a formula, the band's reliance on the previously mentioned instrumental elements in taut rhythms kills any sort of adventurousness hinted at by its members' skills.
As singers, Johnny Collins and Max Hellmann are inept salesmen. They both sound like Cursive's Tim Kasher, but lack the Saddle Creek histrionics that Kasher uses to convince listeners that he really means what he's singing.
The pair comes fairly close on the paranoid "Pyromaniac," yelping about scarecrows and scare tactics, but even then it's hard to buy into because really, there's no telling what they're actually yelping about. The Collins/Hellmann team lets its lyrical ideas stretch out over whole songs, but the two singers are too vague in their execution.
"Fill yourself with air/I don't know how you talk/I've got no time to share/Meet me at the top" they sing in "Maybe We're Dead." There's something to be said for it being cryptic, but that line's just plain confounding.
Bassist Brendan Hughes and drummer Mike Schneider form a formidable rhythm section that makes it easier to look past the band's vocal banality, if only for a few songs. Schneider pulls off some impressive stick-work, but he should share the credit for his most imposing hits with producer Alex Newport and his wise choice of pushing the drums higher in the mix.
But like everything else on the album, this rhythmic spice loses its flavor as the album plays on. Hughes' pentatonic explorations grow dull while Schneider's "boom" starts to go "meh."
Had Controlling the Famous whittled "Automatic City" down to four or five songs, the band might have ended up with a decent EP. As it stands, the album functions as an EP that repeats itself over and over again.
Controlling the Famous will be playing tonight in The Red Light Lounge at The Temple Club, 500 E. Grand River Ave. in Lansing, along with New Republic, Downtown Singapore, Vel Victis, Sink With Me, and dangerousWILLY.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for this all-ages show. Tickets are $8 in advance or $10 on the day of the show.
