Pitchfork
July 29, 2010
Link
5.8
In 2006, Santa Cruz, Calif.-based singer/multi-instrumentalist Dylan McKeever released the first Antarctica Takes It! album. Recorded through the internal microphone on a friend's laptop, The Penguin League's intimacy rendered the youthful exuberance of its overstuffed chamber-pop songs more clearly than radio-ready production ever could've. McKeever & co. sold the CD-R for $6 via their MySpace page and eventually caught the ear of the label arm of London-based club night How Does It Feel to Be Loved?, which gave the album a gently remastered reissue in early 2008.
With a little help from an online fundraising drive, Constellations sees Antarctica Takes It! returning as a comparatively polished indie pop outfit, sharing UK stages this summer alongside the Primitives, Love Is All, Allo Darlin', Shrag, and Tender Trap. This sophomore album adds musical complexity, including the occasional prickle of tropical guitar, while keeping the focus on 1950s-minded ditties built from ukulele, piano, and quirky percussion. Lyrically, the record rejoices in music itself, or else frets over romantic anxieties-- hell, multiple songs compare a romantic interest to music-- although with a rhyming-dictionary plainness that sadly keeps Antarctica Takes It! from matching their peers just yet.
McKeever is an astute student of his genre, and he knows how to put together charming, twee-inclined tracks. That's true whether he's stripping down to the glockenspiel and ukulele of "Bossa", which in its esquisitely minimal cutness sharply resembles Japan-based duo Lullatone's avant-twee touchstone "Bedroom Bossa Band", or layering his vocals for the endless-summer harmonies of coastal excursion "Voices". On the piano-rollicking "C&F", McKeever's bookish, lispy voice takes on an enjoyably showy hiccup, the kind of thing descended from Jerry Lee Lewis. More than once, McKeever ends a song with voice-over narration, which works better as a sonic element than it does lyrically; in a few places he's also joined, quite capably, by a pair of similarly understated female vocalists, Maria Schoettler and Rachel Fannan, who bring to mind Stuart Murdoch's God Help the Girl project.
For all of Constellations' homespun craft, it's still a mild disappointment, particularly coming so soon after Allo Darlin' reminded us that there are still great twee-pop songs left unwritten. The dueling strings and crashing sound effects on sock-hop throwback "Spirit of Love" are appealingly constructed, but here's a sample lyric: "I shuddered and shook/ 'Cause into your eyes I could not look." Sure, the album never gets quite this clumsy again, but nearly every rhyme is as emptily obvious as matching "birds of a feather" with "weather" (and "together," and "ever"...). The closest this disc comes to the sharp wit or deep insight of its genre's greats is when McKeever keeps "thinking everything's a sign/ Misread the stars to make you mine," on San Francisco love song "Straight to Your Heart". The Penguin League was a promising, good-hearted debut, but it was certainly no Tigermilk; Constellations is a lot closer to recent indie-pop near-misses by Princeton and Lucky Soul than it is to If You're Feeling Sinister.
