On the surface, Love Inks' debut album, E.S.P. sounds a bit like a hipster dreaming of a girl-angel caught in a box. The Austin, Texas-based band employs that forward-moving chug of bass and oscillating guitar that has become synonymous with most indie pop and rock acts of the last 11 years. It's not necessarily an aesthetic that is devoid of value just because it saturates the market, but then again, it makes distinction an elusive attribute to obtain. It was only upon full listening that I discovered Love Inks actually do have the goods.
Stripping their sound down to guitar, bass and an analog drum machine, the band stand tall in the face of fashionable reverb and delay. The ambience in their music comes not from a layered wall of sound, but from the empty, hollowed space that stretches above them. "Blackeye" is a pristine example - it's a song that ushers you into a lovelorn diner at 3 in the morning. The mood is set by a gentle cycle of guitar notes and a consistent swish of drums. The soft-sold delivery of singer Sherry LeBlanc comes off like an inquisitive but compassionate waitress, "you've got a black eye on your eye/tell me was it from a fight" and the chorus, "did it happen last night?".
Throughout E.S.P., LeBlanc offers a lot of simple, repetitious lyrics with slight twists into cheek. It's a handy device that stems the tides of gushy sentiment and nostalgia. Instead, the album feels like a bunch of enigmatic stories told during a twilight drive across the Southwestern United States. You, naturally, are the driver, while LeBlanc mutters yarns on love, pain, indecision and surrealism in the passenger seat. The other band members sit in back, lazily strumming their instruments in time, making your moonbeam journey a gentle success.
However, E.S.P. isn't perfect and Love Inks find themselves taking two slight detours over the course of their 10 song set list. "Can't Be Wrong" and "Skeleton Key" push the album into more generic territory, with the chunk-flop shift of the bass in "Can't Be Wrong" and the spaced out chords of "Skeleton Key" evoking bands that you and I have heard over and over and over and over. It's a marked disappointment that effectively breaks up the flow of the album, like a shallow pothole surrounded by gleaming asphalt.
Despite this, I feel Love Inks carve out their quiet fire in a thoughtful and consequential way. E.S.P. isn't immaculate but it does point to a band looking to claw their way out of easy trends and shallow expectations. All of this, while retaining a style that they are passionate about and that accurately synthesizes the bright corners of their influences. Personally, I love the idea of a band embracing minimal music arrangement and still coming off as ethereal. It's a breath of fresh air in a market that is dominated by obligatory '80s synthesizers, cascades of delayed guitar lines, noise crescendos galore and humdrum female stand-ins. Love Inks may be lumped in with the recent rash of candy-coated girl bands, such as the mind-numbingly dull Dum Dum Girls, but it's important to not be fooled by lazy critics and publications (basically all of them), Love Inks have a potential all of their own.
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