Summer of Fear

We Say...

Review by Jessica Suarez

Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson's 2008 debut was a document of past lives. Released two years after it was recorded, that album ran down, in MBAR's wobbly electric folk, past run-ins with drug addiction and homelessness, breakups and lost friends. Summer Of Fear catches us up to Robinson's almost-present life, and things aren't looking much better. "Summer's gonna bleach these bones," he promises on opening track "Shake A Shot." Spoiler: it doesn't.

Things stay the same, but at least Robinson's found new ways to dress up his loneliness. Now on Saddle Creek, and with TV on the Radio's Kyp Malone producing (Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor helmed his debut), MBAR's expanded folk palate now references Bruce Springsteen ("Shake a Shot"), Reckoning-era R.E.M. ("Death By Dust"), and Tom Petty, whom MBAR corrects on the beautifully rendered "The 100th of March": "The whole damn thing is the hardest part." So it's no surprise that Robinson's stabs at redemption come off as halfhearted and somber as ever. On album-closer "Boat," his nihilism cuts through Malone's swaths of organ hums, cymbal rolls and reverb as he mumbles out "There's nothing lost 'cause there's nothing there."

As on his debut, MBAR's voice remains front and center, and Malone seems to love setting it in new textures and contexts. The almost-blithe opening electric piano chords of "The Sound" and the string hook that drops in the middle of "Always An Anchor" soften the impact of that voice. Muddled, thin, and prone to break, Robinson's voice is an apt delivery system. We see its full range of abilities on "More Than a Mess." In a painfully detailed description of a love affair's failure, he pushes and pulls at his syllables, shifting from sardonic mock-theatricality to regret within the space of a line. In one sense, this sort of performance obscures the occasional brilliance of the lyrics, but, in forcing us to listen as closely as possible, brings us disturbingly near to the tattered lives Robinson sketches.