Something’s not said too much but I think it’s true, the one thing a pop band must have, above anything anything anything else, is consistency. If you’re a pop band you can’t ride one or two or three good songs, you must have a barrelful because it is your carding card, it is what you are being used for. Last year’s reboot of Paramore had maybe three awesome pop songs and it let them ride in but really it was sleight of hand, there was nothing afterwards, the album couldn’t sustain itself. But Sleeper Agent… the Kentucky based buddies of Cage The Elephant aren’t like that. On their sophomore effort About Last Night you keep waiting for Sleeper Agent to do the dip and the dip never actually arrives.
Heralded by a simply terrific, one of the best songs of year “Waves” , as catchy a track about mass death (lead singer recommends you just “ride the wave) as you’ll ever hear, it is the second song on the album and getting to it is a breeze because “Be Brave” is a sweet as molasses, tight as a drum Rilo Kiley wanna be singalong, and right after “Waves” is the sexy but cutie pie come on “Take It Off” and three songs in and you are thinking, well done Sleeper Agent, the sextet have done what they came for and now we Can settle it for the drag for another four songs before they pop in another sure shot, and it simply doesn’t happen.
In no world I come from is the soulful “Haunting Me’ with its “just like you but it won’t let me through” hook a deep album cut. Skip four tracks just for the shits and giggles and listen to the skittish rocker “Impressed” with its guitar lick like a drum punctuation and another killer hook.
Sleeper Agent have what early Rilo had and Paramore circled but didn’t quite nail down; melodic pop rock melodies by the bushel; they have so many they’d don’t seem to need deep album cuts, or the arty ones, or the prolonged jams. This is all business, all direct, all to the point.
Thematically, lyrically, is the bands weak spot but I was actually having this discussion with somebody just yesterday and the truth is lyric signifies through music and a great melody can save a generic lyric and maybe Sleeper Agent have one or two too many lyrics not up to par (“Sweetheart” has a dog of a lyric to end the album) but the songs are such instantaneous smashes it just doesn’t matter. Melodic, anthemic, bouncy, fun, smart and enormously catchy, About Last Night is 12 songs, 43 minutes worth of consistency. Man, this is an awesome album.
Grade: A
