Here's another review of Still Life.  It is part of this week's issue of "the War Against Silence" at <http://www.furia.com/twas/index.html>


The Connells: Still Life

If Crowded House has come to define, for me, a British variant of pure pop championed at other times by Squeeze, XTC and the Beautiful South, the Connells have long seemed like the American archetype to succeed REM, at least in my private world, where REM stopped mattering around Life's Rich Pageant. Back when I discovered them, with 1989's Fun & Games, their third album, they were mired in the most tenacious kind of obscurity, too self-contained to be superstars, but too balanced to be proper cult figures. Still Life is their seventh album, the original five-man lineup changed only, since 1984, by the addition of keyboard player Steve Potak in time for 1993's Ring, and as far as I can tell they have not budged much more than an inch along any axis against which it would be meaningful to measure them. They are still on the same label, they still play the same sort of dizzyingly gorgeous, faintly bluegrass-infused guitar-pop, they are still mired in tenacious obscurity.

I strongly doubt, at this point, that anything you or I do is going to disturb this evidently-comfortable stasis, and thus I commend the Connells to you only for your own good.
There are few bands as reliable, so if you've missed the Connells up until now, I don't think it makes much difference which album you begin with, and this one is as good as any. The essential core of  the Connells experience, for me, is that listening to their songs is like handling a stone smoothed by centuries of ocean tides. Rock has had an erratic relationship with swagger and stridency, sometimes cultivating them and at other times trying to cover them over with thick layers of make-up, but Connells songs seem to have had all the rough spots worn off by the simple act of fretting over them until there's not a single note left that mars the surface. At worst they'll seem bland to you, at best elemental.
                   
If you've been buying Connells albums before now, this is no time to stop. Doug MacMillan's voice is still frail and angelic, Mike Connell and George Huntley's guitars still know more major
chords than the rest of the universe can fit into the scale, Peele Wimberley's uncluttered drumming
still propels songs at an unhurried trot. 1996's Weird Food & Devastation was a little more amplified than Ring, and Still Life, while reverting to more restrained packaging, doesn't forget any musical lessons. The credits, traditionally diligent about identifying individual authors of each song, this time retreat behind the "All songs written by The Connells" dodge, but the only possibility this raises is that somebody other than Huntley has learned to write in Huntley's unmistakably goofy polka-esque style, well enough to contribute the rolling piano-hall stomp "Curly's Train" and the slithery lullaby "Queen of Charades", and they're embarrassed to admit it. The high points, for me, are the mordant gloom of "Dull, Brown and Gray", a sequel of sorts to Fun & Games' "Uninspired"; the guitar hooks in "The Leper", which are only processor tweaks away from sounding like Big Country; the chiming harmonic runs and haunting pathos of the slow, surging "Bruised"; the distant Ben Folds echoes of the piano on "Glade"; the Hammond whir and deliberate catharsis of "Soul Reactor"; the drum rumble and leaping choruses of "Crown"; the fluttering falsetto harmonies of "Circlin'"; and the off-center snare cadences of the muted concluding instrumental, "Pedro Says". I wouldn't call any of these touches "new", but when I want new, there are other places to find it.


There you have it.  In case anyone is interested, following is a list of all this week's reviews at the address I gave above:

                Neil Finn: Try Whistling This
                Hothouse Flowers: Born
                The Connells: Still Life
                Velvet Crush: Heavy Changes
                Sloan: Navy Blues
              

Later,

Scott