Sound Advice: The Only Really Thing by Spiral Beach

Every Tuesday, Torontoist scours record store shelves in search of the city’s most notable new releases and brings you the best—or sometimes just the biggest—of what we’ve heard in Sound Advice.

It's hard not to feel a bit of affection towards Spiral Beach; they've always unabashedly embraced their youth and the restlessness (and awkward fashion) that goes with it, and in their element they've carved a genuine place into both the brains of moody music critics and the headphones of young Canadian music fans. The Only Really Thing, the band's second full-length (out today on Sparks Music), has a few hints of an experimental maturation, but mostly stays a little too close to the retro-beat pop that defined them.

The good: Spiral Beach has worked with The Hidden Cameras' Mike Olsen again, which means lots of layering and an attitude to experimenting with an experienced ear guiding the detours. The bad: The Only Really Thing sounds too much like a band following a self-perceived blueprint and winds up sounding largely like a collection of old Metric cast-offs. In "Battery," the brooding Blondie basslines provide the only tension in an otherwise flat opener, and first single "Domino" relies on a formulaic stop/start set of synthesizers and shouting that does little to create an actual compelling dynamic. But (more good!) that dynamic is achieved to awesome pop-rock effect on "Scour & Devour," where the marching drums and perfectly crunchy guitars play nice with the sparsely decorated open space and gradual vocal build, and on "Vagueries," (streaming above) the kitsch is toned down to a comfortable level of eccentricity that shines like Mother Mother doing their best Pixies homage.

The album closes with "Shake the Chain," a song that again dabbles in legitimate weirdness, using eerie open space and the sound of a chain dropping to the floor for percussion; it shows a side of the band that, if nurtured, could shift them from being endearing Toronto indies into a well-grounded, alt-pop elitehood. It's a pretty common and unavoidable case of identity limbo, but if Spiral Beach goes towards the dark, the follow-up to The Only Really Thing could make a musical impression strong enough to accompany their drive and surpass their already likeable image.