Hot Wax: Mates of State’s Re-arrange Us

The full version of this review appears in the pages of TRACER Magazine.

On their fifth full-length, San Francisco’s Mates of State broaden their musical horizons with a little help from some talented friends. Unfortunately, a cadre of guest musicians (including Chris Walla, Ben Gibbard, and Jim Eno) and some slick production cannot save Re-arrange Us from being an altogether unfulfilling album.

Re-arrange Us marks a significant musical evolution for Mates of State. The husband-and-wife duo of Kori Gardner (vocals, keyboards) and Jason Hammel (vocals, drums) have always known a thing or two about writing hook-laden pop songs, but their latest album sees them expanding their artistic palette considerably. The Mates’ cascading melodies and vocal harmonies now float atop a bed of strings, brass, and guitars. Despite this fuller sound, though, there is a surprising lack of depth on display.

This shallowness is particularly true of the album’s lyrical content, which runs the gamut from bearably cheesy to unbearably trite. On mid-album track “Jigsaw,” for example, Gardner and Hammel open with the unnecessary call-and-response of: “You write the good songs, baby/ You write the good songs, baby/ I’ll write them ‘til the end/ I’ll write them ‘til the end/ And you can stand up above us/ And you can stand up above us/ And we can still be friends/ And we can still be friends,” before introducing the hazy simile after which the song is named. Even worse is “Great Dane,” a song that devotes several measures to the painful repetition of the word (I use the term loosely) “da.” A chorus that proclaims, “I can hear you t-t-t-tonight, t-t-tonight/Sing in the sunshine,” does very little to redeem the effort.

The studio gloss applied to Re-arrange Us makes such vapid observations easier to stomach, but it also drowns out any of the personality that could be found on earlier Mates of State efforts. The result is a dreadfully domesticated power-pop album that lacks any sense of exuberance. I’m hard pressed to find any real hint of emotion on Re-arrange Us. Instead, the lazy and repetitive songwriting on display creates a sense of artistic contentment. Even with ample assistance in the studio, the duo’s musical bombast rings false here. Re-arrange Us clocks in at a generously brief 35 minutes, but even that seems a bit too long, considering the general lack of substance on the album.

Curt Whitacre