Pitchfork

While it's nice to hear Mac McCaughan hearken back to his indie rock roots while puttering around with his now-center-stage side-project, those efforts pale in comparison to what McCaughan and Portastatic are capable of. Sure, warm nostalgic fuzzies could be had with a track like "I'm in Love (With Arthur Dove)", with its Superchunky chorus lead-in, or the castigation of certain fuckers in "You Blanks". In light of the other seven tracks on this album, however, these minor capitulations to the rock seem like bones thrown to a certain sect of fans waiting for Superchunk to go from sporadic touring unit to fully functional music-producing outfit. It's been over five years since those folks had something new to do the standing still to. If Portastatic keeps this up, it might be prudent to make the hiatus permanent.

Be Still Please does a fine job of ignoring the title's polite suggestion. It's an album that shows McCaughan & co. pushing forward, building on both the previous album (Portastatic's first as an official group) and Mac's film soundtrack work. Strings and woodwinds abound, and are fitting accoutrements to McCaughan's songs. It's a telling sign that the orchestrations that once stuck out clumsily in his work now feel like integral parts of his songs. They sweeten the album's lead-off track, "Sour Shores", and, in conjunction with Laura Cantrell's back-up vocals, lend a tasteful melancholy to "Black Buttons". As noted before, it's the rockier tracks that stick out. Every time a electric guitar solo comes out, or the drummer decides to get his money's worth out of his kit, it sounds awkward and out of place.

A more flattering sound for the group is the smooth bossa nova sway of "Sweetness and Light", which features McCaughan turning his lyrical acuity on his own well-documented vocal shortcomings: "I know my voice is like a broken saw/ I know my voice is like a sickly shrew." He doesn't let this stop him from getting all he can out of his pipes. On "Black Buttons", he sounds quite similar the late Grant McLennen of the Go-Betweens, with Cantrell's voice serving as the perfect stand-in for Amanda Brown's. For "Getting Saved", he wears his appreciation for Eric Bachmann's Neil Diamond idolatry with raspy pride. It's a pride he's earned. McCaughan's confidence, in his talents and his songs, is readily apparent throughout this album, and the result is his best non-Superchunk work to date.