Sunny Day Sets Fire's debut full-length certainly
has the right raw elements to make Elephant 6 devotees' summers a little
brighter. Operating on the reasonable theory that everything sounds better when
sprinkled with glockenspiel and power-pop guitars, Summer
Palace
has sunshine and chord changes to spare. Likeable enough in theory, it's
dragged down by misplaced ambition: Two-thirds of the songs clock in at more
than four minutes long, and the whole thing adds up to an hour, far too
ungainly to be spritely. Everything ends up melting into a haze of diffuse
perkiness. The odd hiccup intrudes: "End Of The Road" has a guitar line that
sounds suspiciously like "Hotel California," but soon tames it with obligatory
hand-claps. "Siamese" is a nice shot of melancholy, but it's a momentary
deviation. If Blonde Redhead has made the world safe for weird international
combinations of musicians—this band represents Italy, Hong Kong, Canada,
and the UK—to revamp classical pop formulas, SDSF would do better to try schizophrenic formalism rather than this monolithic approach.