Patience Please, Fleeting Frequencies

reviewed by dave heaton

I’m not going to try and come up with some overall thematic framework, based on the lyrics, to describe Patience Please’s debut full-length, even though it’s one of my favorite pastimes. (Other people play sports, I parse lyrics and music for clues I can convert into a review.) In this case it’s not the lyrics I’m listening to. Don’t get me wrong, the lyrics are fine. There’s some that jump out at me and capture that words-oriented part of my brain. I like “The Way She Looked Away”’s opening line a whole lot (“I could go on and on all day / about the way she looked away”), and “Looks Familiar”’s chorus of “don’t make me turn this car around”, and the album-closing image of a penny smashed on railroad tracks. And “If You’re Sure”’s line “You and I were born in 1984” never fails to make me feel old. (Actually, now that I think of it, I could build some theme here about youth or childhood, maybe.)

Despite those examples, while I’m listening to Fleeting Frequencies I’m not paying that much attention to the lyrics – I’m too busy tapping my foot, nodding my head, or doing whatever other body movement suggest that you’re digging songs because of how good they sound to you. Because of the tunefulness of it. Because, in this case, of the snappy rhythms, the guitars that appear and get louder and disappear, the harmony vocals, the keyboard parts. Their basic approach is fairly minimalist, with each instrument used at just the right time. That’s intuitive more than scientific; as a listener you know when a band is playing their instruments in a way that complements the tune, when the lead and harmony vocalists singing together adds sweetness without overdoing it, and so on.

My favorite song is probably “If You’re Sure” (it’s that up/down thing in the chorus), but really this is an album where the songs all hang together as a whole. There’s an element of variety to their debut EP Parallel Plots that isn’t here, for the sake of cohesion probably. And cohesion is what they’ve achieved: a winning, infectious sound that makes the album imminently playable.

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