Pitchfork

You know, if there's one band I've never liked, it's Rainer Maria. Epitomizing everything wrong with the Midwestern emo movement of the late 90s, Rainer combined their diary-excerpt lyrics, dampened-punk sound, and pretentious aesthetic to create suffocating levels of melodrama that backpack drones of the Great Plains ate up like Doritos. With singer Caithlin de Marrais wailing out her vocals like a nailgun to my head, and Kyle Fischer's off-tune counterpoints not helping matters, the poet-named trio was always near the top of my enemies list.

So it probably comes as no surprise that I find Long Knives Drawn to be not very good, not very good at all.

Long Knives Drawn continues a direction Rainer first explored on 2001's A Better Version of Me, a failed experiment in shoegazer rock that replaced the usual cold monotone singing with impassioned capital-V Vocals. The result: Decisive proof that separating the stretched-out chord storms and detached microphone work of shoegazing is like the fatal severance of Siamese twins. Somehow, as weak as the band was before A Better Version, this approach made them even worse.

Which means it's at least a small relief that Long Knives Drawn starts out sounding more like the slightly more palatable early material, with the first three songs building to fiery peaks that are all too quickly abandoned. The lyrics quickly assume the fetal position, however, with lines ("you need contact daily, or conscience is failing") worthy of similarly over-serious mopester Pedro the Lion.

I could rag on the script all day, but the failings of Long Knives Drawn go beyond mere solipsism. De Marrais' constant fretting about wilting love is kept company by Fischer's run-of-the-mill fretwork, rarely contributing more than a overdriven fuzztone after the admittedly arm-swinging "Ears Ring". Stripped of the band's old jittery tendencies, much of the music just floats on by beneath de Marrais' histrionics, while a sat-on organ in (yipes) "The Awful Truth of Loving" does little to expand their dried up sound.

Without instrumental distractions, those wince-inducing words just keep ringing, ringing, ringing in my head. Consider the clincher on "The Imperatives", where the breathtakingly awful crowning statement is "I was thinking we could go and live in a monastery."

I went into Long Knives Drawn with, well, long knives drawn, but the album's complete inessentiality appears to even trump my considerable bias. Admittedly, the record does have a few more listenable moments than I was initially prepared to give it credit for, but as a whole, the album is such a continued watering-down of their old sound that I find it hard to believe it would even appeal to the Rainer Maria faithful. Chalk up another victory for the Pitchfork status quo.

You know, I've got to be square with you. I used to like Rainer Maria. Having been a Midwestern teenager in the late 90s, square in the midst of my Melodramatic Period, Rainer's sense of tragic romanticism and ever-so-slightly math-punk sound was exactly what I was looking for in the late high-school/early college years. Powered by the wonderfully wrong harmonies of singers Caithlin de Marrais and Kyle Fischer, the trio hit their stride early with their debut's opener "Tinfoil" and Look Now Look Again, their second and best record.

So you understand how I'd disappointed that Long Knives Drawn is not very good, not very good at all.

Though I'm not too surprised, really, after the trajectory suggested by their 2001 release A Better Version of Me, a highly flawed effort that found the band smoothing out the time-sig skips and clashing duets for an unsatisfying Loveless-lite sound. Largely missing Fischer's distinctive vocal interactions, while reflecting his increased complacency with sitting on single (albeit noisy) chords for indeterminable amounts of time, A Better Version wasn't so much deserving of scorn as it was yawningly bland.

Long Knives Drawn at least hints at a rebound, starting off at an energetic clip with three songs which, at times, show hints of the band's old spark. "Ears Ring" even contains an abrasive riff and pessimistic chorus worthy of Pedro the Lion ("you need contact daily, or conscience is failing"), though without David Bazan's morose delivery, it doesn't come off quite so meaningful.

It's all a log roll downhill from there, though, as it becomes increasingly clear that Fischer isn't going to step to the mic, and the music isn't going to regain much of its previous unpredictability and kick. Rainer Maria doesn't even seem up to conjuring up much of a storm any more, "The Double Life" and "The Imperatives" being surprisingly tame, dampered affairs too lacking in boister to attract attention, and "Situation Relation" forgettably occupying the band's now-customary solemn, finger-picked closing track slot.

But ultimately, it's the unbearable triteness of the lyrics that does Long Knives Drawn in. Rainer sympathizer as I might be, I just can't forgive lines like "I think that we should go and live in a monastery" serving as the vocal hook without popping a Rolaid.

I went into Long Knives Drawn hoping for a comeback to justify my unpopular soft spot for Rainer Maria, but I've come away with all my fears about their route confirmed, wondering if my previous fanship was just one of those cheeky mistakes of youth. Whatever the reason for my apathy, it's a sentiment concisely summed up by the band itself: "Once there was something, and now there's just a piece of atmosphere." Chalk up another victory for the Pitchfork status quo.