Album Review

Saint Motel – Voyeur

• 9th Jul 2012

Los Angeles quartet Saint Motel are a difficult band to define. Their indie pop based approach mixes in elements of big band music and Latin rhythms to create a sound that is loud, pulsating and at times chaotic.

Their self-released debut album Voyeur has eleven tracks that are largely high energy and explosive, but at times ultimately too sonically cluttered for their own good. There are some fine melodies and some great beats, but the overall concoction doesn’t always hang together. It has dynamism and power aplenty and in places this works well, but in others the various musical elements seem to clash rather than complementing each other.

1997 is perhaps the standout track. It has a retro sound with the mix of keyboards and guitars over a pulsating drum beat sounding decent and the vocals are strong. Another, Benny Goodman, contains bursts of swing music within its pop structure, as you might expect, and it works well. The different sounds here do seem to come together and it is a pleasant tribute song.

Feed Me Now has a lovely bass line and smooth vocal delivery in amongst a wall of harmonies and instrumentation. It’s a decent pop song, even if the effects are a little overdone. You Do It Well has an eighties feel, the vocals rising and faking well. And Puzzle Pieces starts out promisingly with a jaunty piano but the song goes rather flat in the middle section.

The other tracks, to be honest, merged rather into one for me, with little to make them stand out. It’s not that they are bad, rather that the chaos overtakes the melodies in a way that cries out for less, for simplicity.

Saint Motel are clearly a band with plenty of energy and a multitude of musical ideas. And I have a feeling that they are probably a very exciting live act. But on this album I don’t think they have allowed the musical talents that the four members clearly have to come through as much as they could have.