Written by Chris Familton

Continuing the recent trend of American bands looking back to 60s and 70s pop for inspiration, The Morning Benders have released an album that avoids the garage-rock side of the tracks and instead focuses on pop melodies in the vein of The Beach Boys alongside orchestral elements and the ability to find a hook and focus on it rather than burying it in complex structures or excessive instrumentation.

Big Echo is still defiantly indie, at least in the current climate of bands like Grizzly Bear, Vetiver and Vampire Weekend. Unlike the last of those acts, The Morning Benders don’t have any sense of smugness or a veil of pretension with ivy league jerseys and boat shoes surrounding their music. The music does the talking, whispering and cooing all on its own. It doesn’t require the listener to know about the band or what they look like as it creates its own cosy world.

Promises possesses an absolutely gorgeous central guitar riff that grooves in a softly defiant manner. It gives the song a bold swing feel that allows the vocals to soar and spiral over the top. It shows the band aren’t lightweight indie folksters and that they can dial up some darker, melancholic grit in their sound when they need to.

The strength of their melodies is exemplified by the infectious Cold War (Nice Clean Fight) with its sing-song chorus that is both effervescent pop and nursery rhyme-like in its catchiness. The flipside to the bubblier moments comes in the form of Pleasure Sighs with its ghostly reverb and a strong touch of Grandaddy and Grizzly Bear in the way they use restraint and more abstract guitar sounds to gently shift momentum and mood through the song.

The grandiose moments on the album aren’t generally constructed with bombast or epic turns, instead The Morning Benders cleverly use percussion (orchestral sounding toms) pauses and subtle changes in direction to push the songs into wide open spaces. Much of their music is bathed in reverb which enhances the space and soundstage feel to their music. In a large theatre The Morning Benders would sound exceptional.

The band takes a diversion to the 80s on All Day Daylight and as a result sound strangely akin to popsters like Nik Kershaw with the song’s upbeat yet cleverly angled form. Fans of bands who are exploring this kind of territory at a greater depth – Yeasayer, Hot Chip – should find much to like among Big Echo’s many highlights.

Much of Big Echo’s charm lies in the way it seeps into your memory cells and draws you back to it again and again. There is a familiarity due to the stylistic indicators, predominately from the 60s and 70’s but it also pulls sonically from more recent decades. The Morning Benders have produced a masterful debut that is grand, sophisticated, elegant and worthy of embrace by fans of classic sounding indie pop.

This review first appeared on The Dwarf