Artisans & Merchants

For a brief time in the 1990s, New York band the Van Pelt carved out their own distinctively individualized niche, making powerfully moving songs that bore some similarities to the urgency and sentiment of emo but defied easy categorization. Singer/guitarist Chris Leos sing-speak vocal style and uncommon lyrical turns fit the bands minimal but driving sound, and they produced two albums and a handful of miscellaneous tracks before disbanding in 1997. Some years later, when they reconvened for the occasional show, the band felt inspired to do more than just relearn old material, and they slowly began working on new songs. Artisans & Merchants is the Van Pelts first studio album of completely new material since their 1997 bummer summit, The Sultans of Sentiment, and much like that album was on a different page than the groups more propulsive 1996 debut, Stealing from Our Favorite Thieves, Artisans & Merchants is a brand-new chapter as well. Though Leos vocals still wander between spare melodies and spoken-word oration, he expands the range of his style to include stacked falsetto harmonies on the moody and galloping "Image of Health" and leading with a light croon on "Old Souls from Different Epochs." Artisans & Merchants has remnants of the soft, reflective tones of some of their older material, but theres also a newfound swagger. The drums are crispy and push the tunes along, and guitar lines wiggle purposefully on tracks like "Did We Hear the Same Song" and move between spare post-punk riffs and dissonant blurts on the title track. Expansive closing track "Love Is Brutal" even flirts with ambient synths and whispery electronic sounds. The only fleeting glimmers of nostalgia come with some of the storytelling in the lyrics, as when recounting strange travels of the past or vividly depicting a bleak tour stop with the uneasy melodies of "Punk House." The Van Pelts work in their early days was on a course of its own, and Artisans & Merchants continues that restless exploring. That the band avoids simply repeating themselves for the sake of making something comfortable is a success in and of itself, and their ability to take new steps in their evolutionary journey after a quarter-century away is also a remarkable feat. ~ Fred Thomas