The Drums

The Smiths are bona fide rock heroes to a certain class of music listener—Morrissey’s wry observations and oblique narratives served as the textbook for a generation of young songwriters better at nailing down the image than his writing.

The Drums produce a very different kind of song than the Smiths, but their likeness to Morrissey’s character type (dorky, attractive, overly emotive) is easily identifiable in 2011. Drums frontman Jonathan Pierce fulfills this retro aesthetic with panache. His onstage charisma—deliberately awkward dance moves and a Williamsburg wardrobe—was certain to resonate with a new breed of music fan who learned Morrissey through Belle & Sebastian.

So, even as a young band with just one EP under their belts, The Drums were unsurprising major label candidates in early 2010. It didn’t hurt that that release, Summertime!, contained three of their best songs to date. “I Felt Stupid,” “Let’s Go Surfing” and “Submarine” are expertly crafted, capturing a vibrant spiritedness constituted by familiar melodies tied to simple, yearning lyrics. Their self-titled full-length debut, released last year on Universal, showed similar strengths but introduced ballads to Pierce’s repertoire.

Portamento runs the gamut of Pierce’s songwriting strengths and weaknesses: snippets of observation and shadows of emotion best convey head-over-heels vulnerability. The opening track exhibits this latter quality, as Pierce tries to make a daring moral proclamation: “I believe that when we die, we die/ So let me love you tonight.” The imagery of “Blue Shadows,” where Pierce recalls “blue stripes around your ankle,” gives endearing perspective into his emerging sexuality. Homoromantic imagery and subtext are present in some of the Drums’ best tracks; “If He Likes It, Let Him Do It,” one of Portamento’s strongest songs, advises, “dim the lights and let him do it,” while the music cops a creepy, New Order atmosphere. But other moments are a bit too elementary-memoir, such as “Please Don’t Leave,” a song whose chorus matches its name, and lacks the strong melodies needed to overcome the cliché.

Pierce’s vocal affectations (including his portamento) are crucial for injecting personality into this well-tread sound, but this element is absent from much of the teenage balladry that comprises the album’s second half. The music’s down-tempo jangle and slouchy rhythm belie the band’s name, and the murky homogeneity is at odds with the their highly danceable live shows.

In the past decade, these weirdly stylish performances would have found a home amid a specific hipster scene in the UK. Now that it’s welcomed by a larger audience, it’s good to see the band capitalizing on their identity instead of forcing evolution. But the melodies just aren’t strong enough, even when the performance and posturing is spot on. Unabashed sincerity is admirable nonetheless, and falls in line with a new kind of punk ethos that can trace its lineage back to dance pop duo the Tough Alliance. So while most detractors will move on to a newer buzz, you wouldn’t be faulted for anticipating The Drums’ next release.