The Middle Ages

Ecstatic press in some corners aside, it would be a mistake to call Saso's The Middle Ages (their third full-length) a truly great album. It doesn't restart a genre or establish new rules, its impact won't be as profound as other works and ultimately, there's a little too much of the suffocating contextual influence of Coldplay kicking around (piano plus high, delicate vocals just call up some unfortunate associations these days). But these points aside, what the Dublin-based duo have done here is create a surprisingly good release indeed, one that may yet be their transitional effort to something truly epochal. Emphasizing a very restrained melancholia — it's interesting to hear, as the album progresses, how the band never gives in to the impulse to burst forward, instead maintaining a careful tension up through the conclusion of the ninth song, "Chasing Monsters." Saso find themselves at odds with many other bands these days as a result. There's no giddy bursting rush, no trudging attempts at whining romance — rather, this is rock music as minimal mood piece, as derived from acts like the Autumns and Spain as much as, say, Talk Talk's calmest side, with keyboards rather than guitars the chief instrument on many tracks. Jim Lawler, the singer and core of the band, continues to play the role of cryptic, fragile frontman very well, softly keening rather than declaiming; producer Ben Rawlins frames the mix in soft, distanced echo and unexpected twists and turns, like the snippet of shouting on "Bone." At other points — the beautiful guitar filigree starting "Snowstorm," the piano on the concluding "Chloroform" — all is as captivating as one could hope for. Credit as well for the cover art which, among other things, suggests Saso is in fact a scruffy emo quartet with a fondness for Michel Gondry films. Nothing wrong with a bit of unexpected marketing.