AMG Review of Anthems for Doomed Youth

Mark Deming
All Music Guide

With each album, Montreal's the High Dials have managed to sound just a bit less obsessed with 1960s pop and a little bit more psychedelic (a pretty neat trick given how the two styles overlap in the eyes of so many), and their fourth long player, Anthems for Doomed Youth, reveals they're still finding ways to nudge their lysergic impulses into the '70s and '80s and have a good time doing it. If the High Dials indulge any '60s influences on Anthems for Doomed Youth, they seems to be in folk-rock rather than the U.K.-style pop that provided the template for their earliest recordings, and there's a very Roger McGuinn-like jangle on ""Teenage Love Has Made Me Insane." But songwriter Trevor Anderson seems to have spent significantly more time listening to the sort of bands that took the ideas of the Byrds and ran with them later on, and the album's aural contemporaries are seemingly the likes of R.E.M., Echo and the Bunnymen, the Smiths, and the trippier end of the Paisley Underground crowd; in 2010, that's nostalgia to be sure, but the results at least feel a lot more organic and less forced than on their debut album. The guitar work from Anderson and Robbie MacArthur is crisp and incisive, never wandering aimlessly even when the band drifts along on "Uruguay" and "Bedroom Shadows," and Max Herbert's percussion work is flexible enough to push the rock tunes into fourth gear while allowing the more spectral numbers to follow their blissful ebb and flow. Anthems for Doomed Youth will give those bummed-out kids something engaging to hum along with as they trip out and turn off, and the cool but inviting tone confirms the High Dials are finding new directions in which to point their guitars that give the music a shelf life well past the Summer of Love.