Like some
indie-rock Adam Sandler, Isaac Brock loves to toss bones to his pals. One of
them, Love As Laughter honcho Sam Jayne, has been a huge influence on Brock
since Modest Mouse was a new band in the shadow of Jayne's sadly unsung Lync.
Since then, though, Brock has soared while Jayne has ambled along, making
fair-to-amazing LAL albums for Sub Pop to little fanfare—which is why
Brock released the band's new full-length, Holy, on his own Epic imprint, Glacial
Pace. The disc's production is tidy by LAL standards, but other than that, Holy is another reliable
blast of Jayne's ostensibly lazy, bread-and-butter indie-rock. On "Crosseyed
Beautiful Youngunz"—a wandering song with the lowest note-count of any
jam in recent memory—Jayne floats like a butterfly on pot smoke, while
the Brock-assisted "Paul Revere" is a dark, stinging track that gives messy
birth to a bloody chorus. "Kenny And Jim" comes closest to LAL's
zenith—namely its 2001 album Sea To Shining Sea—by deconstructing early-'70s
Stones and Neil
Young with deadpan relish. To use another analogy: Jayne is the Joe Walsh of
the indie set, a second-string vet whose low-key quirks and soulful
idiosyncrasy keeps him from superstardom (and even his deserved status as a
pioneer). But that's cool; on Holy, instead of aiming for coattails or sympathy, Jayne just
rolls up his sleeves and rocks on.