The Texas outfit Midlake releases their 4th full-length studio album today, titled Antiphon.

What’s somewhat unique about this group is its members’ past histories in jazz training and education, which is very prevalent in the composition on Antiphon. The album has sort of a 60’s-jammy vibe to it, saturated with crazy vocal harmonies (a good example of this is the track “Ages”, with it’s long drawn-out vocal harmony stacking into various dissonant chords).

With Midlake being all seasoned musicians, it’s no wonder why the structure and build of these tracks is fairly advanced. Anyone with any sort of experience in musical composition will recognize this immediately. And for that, the album sounds quite interesting and perks up the ears. At first, anyway…

By the end of the record, I felt it had dragged on a bit. While there’s mild variety between tracks, it wasn’t enough to hold acute attention after the first 2 or 3 songs. I was forced to let it drone in the background while I got other work done, and that is something I see regularly in many artists today. Singer Tim Smith’s vocal patterns here are jazzy and often throw my expectations off (which is a very good thing) but the style never really changes, and I find the melodies getting predictable… as unpredictable as they seem out of the gate.

Save maybe “Vale”, the rest of the record blends together as though it was one long song. In this instance, some might say that it’s a “mood record”, a “theme record” or a “concept album”… but so was Radiohead’s Kid A, an album that had far more ups and downs than Antiphon. Ben Folds Five’s The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner was actually written to be one long piece of music (which they later cut up into tracks), and that record had much more variety to it as well.

Bottom Line: Antiphon is a very well done body of work from Midlake… it just fails to excite after more than a few minutes; the main culprit being the lack of dynamics from song to song. The album might serve best as a droning soundtrack to a moody day… just don’t count on it to be the focal point of it.

Rating: 7/10.

If you’d like to catch Midlake on their supporting tour, here are the dates and locations: