Quickspace
Precious Falling
Hidden Agenda / The Kitty Kitty Corporation (UK)

With slop-rock torchbearers Pavement having put out their most crisp, refined album to date, the American indie scene is in sore need of an album to get folks raised on the Malkmus and Co. over the hump.

Ironically, that album is by an English group. Quickspace's sophomore effort, Precious Falling, breaks a lot of rules. It's filled with moments of intense, ear-splitting noise, but it's devoid of testosterone. It's a shambles but extremely well put together. At times it charms the pants off of you with shoe-staring, hands-in-your-pockets coyness; at others, it tries to tear your head clean off with a blast of searing feedback. At other moments, it intermingles the two elements to create up-beat, noise-filled pop tunes the mainstream music-buying public isn't used to hearing.

The first four songs on the album are fairly conventional, sticking to the format championed by bands like Pavement and The Pastels. The dual male/female vocals are deliberately out-of-sync, and it doesn't matter that neither Cullinan nor primary vocalist Nina Pascale can sing all that well; they just sound so...sweet.

The band surrounds these mis-timed vocals with plodding, semi-repetitive guitar that shambles forward, suggesting Cullinan is going to mess up and ruin the song at any second. Add to that some periodic theremin and Moog noodling, and it sounds like you have a recipe for disaster. Until you listen closely to what the drum, bass and rhythm guitar are doing and realize that it's all planned that way.

And these song's structures merely serve as a conceit to the rest of the album. For after beginning the album with four conventional (though extremely well put together) numbers, Quickspace goes through about as many genre changes as an orchestra conducted by Sybil.

"Quickspace Happy Song #2" is a scorching, feedback-and-flute-based pop song that will have even the most callous grumpy old man bobbing his head to the groove. After four numbers where the band sounds as if it's trying its hardest to keep it all together, it just lets go and has a good time.

This is followed by the Phillip Glass-ian "Hadid," the odd first single from the album, which splices, then speeds up and slows down, vocal loops from "Happy Song," and adds layers and layers of high-hats and Cullinan guitar.

The band slows it down for the next couple of numbers before kicking into the instrumental, "Coca-Lola," which finds Quickspace returning to the sprawling, freeform style of its first album.

"Obvious," up next, has a dreamy, narcotized feel, relying heavily on a drum machine, vibraphone, slowly-strummed, reverb-intense guitar and syrupy-sweet Pascale vocals. The 72-minute album rounds out with another tape edit — this one based on "Coca Lola" — an Eastern European-style, accordion-based waltz and a soaring, slow-building instrumental reminiscent of the film scores of Italian legend Ennio Morricone (The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly).

Like the plodding, oh-my-God-we-have-to-record- tomorrow-and-I-just-looked-at-the-music-now style of the album's early tracks, this record shouldn't work, according to the music books. But it does, quite well. Precious Falling is the sleeper album of the summer (well, at least in America). It's coy. It's majestic. It can peel the paint off your wall, and it picks up Pavement's slack, so to speak, just nicely.

— Eric Wittmershaus (ericw at flakmag dot com)