Music note: A mixed bag of "Mondays" from First Communion Afterparty

When First Communion Afterparty first started attracting buzz in the Twin Cities a few years ago, they seemed like a better idea than an actual band. I mean, who could resist a gaggle of teens and young adults dressed like escapees from a high school production of Hair with ambitions no bigger than making massive, lighters-aloft, psychedelic music and moving to the Portland area to start a commune? Since that time, they’ve hardly slowed up, playing sprawling, many-limbed shows, trekking down to Austin to mint some new fans at South by Southwest, and putting out a live show recording on vinyl, not to mention racking up third place in City Pages‘ Picked to Click. But now that they’ve at long last released their debut studio album, Sorry For All The Mondays And To Those Who Can’t Sing (and if you think I’m ever typing that whole title again, you’re on crack), all that wooly potential has a shape and, like most realized potential, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Live, FCAP were frequently out of tune, occasionally wooden, and often more in love, it seemed, with being a band than playing like one. But they also showed flashes of textural inspiration and genuine charisma, and the sheer cheek of a rock octet—including a tambourine player named Jane Magnitude—seemed like enough to gloss over their aforementioned shortcomings.

Stripped now to a sextet, the studio (in this case, Ed Ackerson’s Flowers) has magnified both their strengths and their shortcomings. Everything is tuned crisply here, and “Like A Fire” features a gorgeously thick and muddy guitar breakdown halfway through propelled into the stratosphere by Mama Cairn’s throat-scorching vocals. It’s easily one of the record’s fieriest and most exciting moments. Album opener “2CB” blossoms into a raucous and driving chorus that recalls Spiritualized or The Verve at their grinding, swirling best.

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You could call it pseudo-hippie pablum, except that more than anything it points to how oddly empty the nostrums of the hippies can sound today.

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But these moments of real excitement, though, shine largely in opposition to the album’s overall turbidity. “Muse” feels like a slog, while the portentous gang vocals of “It Goes To You” mire the song in a drone-y sludge. “Green Turns To Gold” revolves around pseduo-Middle Eastern riffing and nonsensical lyrics made even more resoundingly hollow by how seriously they’re sung: “The eagle will fly / as the sun makes the sky. / The green will arrive / as the sun hits the sky. / The truth will be told / as the sun hits the sky.” You could call it pseudo-hippie pablum, except that more than anything it points to how oddly empty the nostrums of the hippies can sound today. On a side note, anyone looking to dip themselves in Patchouli and celebrate the ’60s is well-advised to take a look at The Sixties Unplugged, by Gerard DeGroot, which compellingly argues that the ’60s counterculture was basically a sham.

But I digress: It’s nothing new for bands from The Warlocks to The Black Angels to those aforementioned British bands to drape themselves more or less in the raiments of the ’60s for aesthetic purposes, if little else. But where The Black Angels succeed on a surfeit of texture and ambiance, and The Verve succeeded only on songs with brilliant hooks, FCAP are more like a Richard Ashcroft album: lacking in both melody and truly original sonic experimentation. In place of tension and release, FCAP string together slow builds into a seemingly endless procession of waves, alluding to as much on the album’s closer, “The Ebb,” where they chant, “We are the flood, we are the ebb, / We are the weavers, we are the web.”

Having heard them live, I had hoped that FCAP’s debut would be much more deeply weird, and that the glints of charm that glittered tantalizingly on the stage would shine brighter on an album. Instead, the studio has cleared away the moss and clutter of the live show and Sorry For All The Mondays… presents First Communion Afterparty as competent miners of psychedelic and garage music, but little else. Here’s to hoping they can push it further out, or pull it back and refocus it more tightly, on their next one.