Antarctica - A Storybook Record

The Never's first, self-titled album was described by critics as ambitious and eclectic, perhaps appropriate since it was, arguably, really their second album. (The band's principals, Noah Smith and Ari Picker, had changed the group's name from the B-Sides after making Yes, Indeed, the B-Sides, Quite! earlier.) They certainly haven't backed off with their sophomore (or is it junior?) effort, Antarctica: A Storybook Record. The "Storybook Record" subtitle refers to the illustrated book, with drawings by Picker, that accompanies the CD (but which was not provided to reviewers). "Both the book and the album chronicle the same story," reveals a sleeve note, "the journey of a country boy returning a nuclear bomb to the city." The album may "chronicle" this story, but the songs don't actually tell it. Instead, the tunes that have lyrics ("On a Mountain" and "Searching and Chasing" are instrumentals) are sung in the voice of a sensitive-sounding narrator for whom the changing seasons mirror the degradation of his romance. Things start out contentedly in the brief opening track, "Summer Time," but before long "Leaves Start to Fall," and the narrator's "summer girl" is being threatened by "old man winter." This story is told in a series of melodic pop songs with sophisticated arrangements that can be distinctly Beatlesque. The music is dreamy pop in which a fiddle sometimes duets with an inexpensive-sounding synthesized percussion track ("On a Mountain") and at other times a full band rocks out. It may be that the implied plot has lent things a unity they might not otherwise have had, since the disc hangs together well as a single piece of music, making it a "concept album" in the old sense of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, if not a rock opera in the manner of Tommy.