Dear and the Headlights: Small Steps, Heavy Hooves

Break out the thick-rimmed glasses, it’s another acoustic indie invasion! This time, on the offensive is Phoenix’s Dear and the Headlights, with their debut Small Steps, Heavy Hooves. Bringing all the standard moves, this album harbors no surprises, hides no aces up its sleeve, shrouds nothing in mystery. Small Steps, Heavy Hooves brings everything we’ve come to expect from acoustic indie music, ever since the first overly sentimental garage band discovered ex-girlfriends, poetry, and open-mic nights.

Dear and the Headlights started out as a garage / bedroom trio, and it doesn’t seem as though they’ve developed past that stage. Dear and the Headlights have a solid sound, which would have been more than enough to get by for small-time college rock shows, but it’s swallowed up far too quickly when compared with thousands of other artists on an international scale. The indie music world does not need another Death Cab For Cutie-cum-Dashboard Confessional-cum-acoustic wonder. It’s almost as if Dear and the Headlights already exist, in dozens of permutations, in dozens of other bands, all blurring into a morass of checkered shirts, tight jeans and steel-string guitars. Guys, we’ve heard this all before.

The formula for acoustic indie outfits has been tried and tested and found to be very successful. Unfortunately, a successful formula is one that gets used again, and again, and again. Dear and the Headlights don’t seem to possess any particular skills to set them apart from their contemporaries. While the vocals are well-projected and consistent, even as vocalist Ian Metzger screeches and yelps his way through opener “Oh No!”, the band’s instrumental components are severely lacking in strength. At times, Metzger may as well be singing a capella, due to the band being so understated, so generic, so uninspiring in its melody. The music is incredibly safe, and takes absolutely no chances. It almost seems to have been added as an afterthought, and is predictable from the first chord to the last. The band have chosen the same path with the lyrics. Just check out the prose of “Sweet Talk”, a ponderous post-breakup number:

You’ve got your new boyfriend, /

I bet he likes you more than he likes me, /

Cause I’m the former one, /

And he’s the latter one.

This isn’t exactly Shakespeare.

It’s not that it’s a particularly bad album; it even has at least one good moment, found in the sentimental “Mother Make Me Golden”, a bittersweet track, rich with piano accompaniment and a longing for the simplicity of childhood. Small Steps, Heavy Hooves is not skill-less, or awkward, or clashing. It’s not really anything, and therein lies the problem. This album falls so neatly into mediocrity, it’s very hard to get passionate about it, whether that passion is positive or negative. After spinning this album half a dozen times, I found myself wondering just what I’d spent the last four hours listening to, and not able to recall a single track. Dear and the Headlights will be great for you and your soft-spoken scenester significant other to play in your car stereo, while you share cigarettes and make out. However, it doesn’t really exceed anything other than idle background music.

The time has come for these carbon-copy bands to re-evaluate exactly what it is that they’re trying to achieve. Do they really want a career built on comparisons to other, better bands? Music has always been full of bands that sound similar, if not identical. However, haven’t we all learned that taking musical chances is, more often than not, undeniably rewarding? Music should be an evolutionary process — discovering new technologies, new hooks, unspoken lyrics with unexplored themes. Bands and musicians should never create music with the specific purpose of sounding like someone else. This may not have been intentional in the case of Dear and the Headlights, but each song is filled overwhelmingly with a sense of the dull familiar. Small Steps, Heavy Hooves is nothing new, nothing spectacularly, stunningly undiscovered. Next time round, with a bit of luck, they’ll try taking some big leaps out of mediocrity, and into originality.