Album Review: Deleted Scenes' Birdseed Shirt
In a past Three Stars interview, DCist Music Editor Amanda Mattos called D.C./Brooklyn quartet Deleted Scenes "not a great local band, but a great band in general." Listening to their debut LP, Birdseed Shirt, it's difficult to challenge that assessment. Named after an invention dreamed up by Jonathan Safran Foer's protagonist in the novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Birdseed Shirt is brimming with ideas — much like Foer's book — and clearly the work of artists destined to exist outside of the "local" category.
It's an understatement to call the album, which was produced by Rude Staircase's L. Skell and local music icon J. Robbins, an ambitious debut. Not content with retreading worn indie rock conventions, Deleted Scenes mixes up genres and styles on practically every song, from the bluesy swagger of opener "Turn to Sand" to the playful "Ithaca" — which answers the question "If Peter Gabriel jammed with Sunny Day Real Estate, what would it sound like?" (Answer: Awesome.)
But while the music and songwriting are consistently solid, you can't help but notice two distinct Deleted Scenes emerging over the course of the album. There's the fun-loving Deleted Scenes, heard on tracks like "Got God", which ambles along like a countrified Graham Coxon B-side circa 1998. And then there's the moody Deleted Scenes, found mostly in the back-to-back tracks "City That Never Wakes Up", "One Long Country Song" and "Deacons". The odd pacing is a little reminiscent of Modest Mouse's The Moon & Antarctica, in which three songs — "The Cold Part", "Alone Down There" and "The Stars Are Projectors" — bring the mood down a little too much before the band launches back into a song like "Wild Packs Of Family Dogs" (or in Deleted Scenes' case, the noisy "Another, Worse Cliche"). There's nothing wrong with the moody Deleted Scenes. The songs are just a bit of a momentum killer when lined up like that.
Placing that bit of criticism aside, Birdseed Shirt is a fantastic debut and it reinforces what we've been saying about these DCist Unbuckled vets all along. It's shocking that this band isn't huge.
Deleted Scenes will be holding a CD release show for Birdseed Shirt at the Black Cat on Dec. 18, with Exit Clov and La Strada.