Schooner/The Sames/Erie Choir/Summer Set, 3x4

reviewed by dave heaton

It's rare to find an album that's split among four bands yet presents one overall mood so well as 3x4 does. Featuring three songs apiece by the North Carolina bands Schooner, The Sames, Erie Choir, and Summer Set, 3x4 has the atmosphere of a sunny, quiet day, like mellow time spent out in the country to clear your head and help you figure out where your life's going.

"As an Indian sun burns up the past / these ghosts become old hat". Schooner begins the album with the lovely "Indian Sunburn," with soft guitars and organ tones supporting a repeating melody, sung in a hushed but direct voice by singer Reid Johnson. The song circle backs around; when it's on I feel like it could go on forever and I wouldn't care. I get a similar effect from Schooner's more rollicking pop-rock song "Birds and Other Creatures", a looking-back song with nature imagery and rising and falling harmonies which ends on a vaguely lovelorn and bittersweet note: "Have you waited all along for me / well you're free," Johnson sings, accentuating his words with hammering guitars.

There's a pretty-but-melancholy tone too to all three songs by Erie Choir, even when the singer's opening up his bruised heart, as on the folk-pop song "Impolite." There's a certain kind of tropical feeling to that song, and to their "My First Ocean," which nods towards both '50s pop slow-dances and the music of beach bums (and Elvis Costello, for that matter) with its 'blue moon' mood. That holiday feeling balances nicely with the direct, grounded-in-hurt tone that Eerie Choir often takes.

The Sames are a more high-voltage band, their energetic rock often hearkening back to '90s 'alternative'. Here they manage to conjure up a similar tone as the other bands, without adjusting their basic style all that much. "I Hear Angels Coming" and "Coney Island of the South" are loud and raucous; yet the former's afterlife theme and the latter's nighttime scene fit right in. And their third song, "Seagrove," exists in a dreamlike state, slowly unfolding as the lyrics draw small sketches of scenes from a life, real or dreamed.

3x4 closes with "Crackhead in My Car," a glowing sunset of a song from Summer Set. It's overtly impressionistic, with as light-as-air lead vocals and a lost-in-a-daze tone. The other Summer Set songs offer a similar aura, like you're tripping across the sky, though "Lost to the Frost"'s vocals and lyrics are more earthbound, an expression of the ambiguity and confusion of relationships. That song, like every song on 3x4 has sensitivity but also force, plus a uniquely evocative mood.

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