Music, Record Reviews

New Record: Mobius Band, Heaven

Posted by: Johnny Loftus on November 2, 2007 at 12:45 pm

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MOBIUS BAND, Heaven (Misra, 2007)

Listen: myspace.com/mobiusband

When Junior Boys remixed “The Loving Sounds of Static” into the blog-scourers’ summer love jam for 2006, they did it by splitting the heart of Mobius Band’s sound into two dripping halves and muting the rest. What was left were the band’s essential strengths: on the one hand, singer Ben Sterling’s slightly drawling melodies; on the other, the percolating energy of 8-bit keyboard giggles, watercolored synth pads and a darkly-compressed live rhythm section.

The Brooklyn-based three-piece has taken a cue from that deconstruction in creating Heaven, their newest. It’s electronics-driven, but Mobius’s bionic band feel is tempered with plenty of pensively sweet pop, and it’s a starker separation than before. Tour veterans by now, they also flex the hard-earned muscularity of their ensemble chops at new, anthemic levels (“Secret Language,” “Control”) and saddle that energy in the blown-speaker crunch of circuit-bent Casios (“Hallie,” “Friends Like These”).

Despite a mix that is often intimate when it should be cavernous, and a curiously back-loaded running order (the album’s best tracks – “Control,” “Black Spot,” “I Am Always Waiting” – don’t even come until the second half), Heaven is far more accessible than anything Mobius Band has tried before. For a band that’s as comfortable holed up in their attic studio as they are owning a live stage, they were smart to use their love of micro-sized textures in the greater service of this expansive and catchy new material. With its sweet hooks and tom tom-heavy U2-isms, Heaven is clearly reverse-engineered for crowd pleasing. — Daniel Johnson

[tags]Mobius Band, Heaven, Misra[/tags]

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