The Soft Hills – Chromatisms

A year since last album The Bird is Coming Down to Earth, Seattle’s The Soft Hills return sounding slightly less pastoral and a tad more cosmic, successfully expanding their horizons without quite managing to consistently turn ‘good’ to ‘great.’ The echoing, fragile Payroll is one of the few tracks to emphatically earn the latter epithet, its sparse crawl and satellite bleeps constituting the album’s chilly peak.

The most recurrent reference point for The Soft Hills’ sprawling sound remains Midlake, partly due to some obvious shared influences; Garrett Hobba’s high, slightly reedy vocals, for example, owe a definite debt to Neil Young, particularly on tracks like closing country ballad Desert Rose. When the band’s touchstone inspirations are parlayed well, the results flirt with brilliance. But elsewhere, Chromatism’s unswervingly downbeat tone robs individual songs of impact, meaning that, for the time being at least, excellence is the exception rather than the rule.