The Silent Years’ third album is perplexing, but reasonably so. The
Detroit-based group makes songs with all the frills: emotive string sections,
jaunty brass, the occasional majestic organ, all filling out multi-part songs
that wouldn’t know how to draw a straight line with a ruler and graph paper. “Pay
It Back,” the disc’s best, blows a climax less than halfway in: The harps soar,
the trumpets march, and suddenly everything peters out. “Don’t you think that
it’s yours because maybe it belongs to everyone,” Josh Epstein repeats over and
over as all the sections vamp, steadily diminishing in volume until nothing’s
left. It’s a perverse way to build a song, eminently representative of how The
Silent Years work: Opener “Out Into The Wild” leaves listeners there, somewhere
in a murk of looped keyboards and wordless vocals. The whole album’s busy with
lively sounds and background noise, and it’s hard to argue with the
intelligence of what’s going on moment-to-moment, but it never adds up. These
aren’t fragments; they’re incomplete arcs.