When you get a stack of records to review in the mail, you kind of tend to hope for the best and worst. Terrific records are easy to go on about, and terrible records are fun because you get to use lots of expletives and disparaging adjectives in your review. When you get a record that sits squarely in the middle, your heart kind of sinks.

So it is with Los Angeles rockers Secretary Bird, although I hesitate to use the word “rock” because it implies some sort of physical motion is involved. Really, the only thing I can picture myself doing to this album is standing very still, perhaps a drink in one hand, maybe nodding a little bit here and there, and then clapping politely at the end. Surreptitiously, I might sneak in a glance at my watch.

Secretary Bird are not bad by any means. And in fact, “not bad” is about the extent to which I can effectively write about this band. Led by sometime Friend Of Dean Martinez Mike Semple, the Bird trade in slow, spare, twangy “rock” songs that are mainly a bare-bones frame on which to hang Semple’s heavily echoed guitar. Imagine Ira from Yo La Tengo fronting Son Volt and you might be somewhere in the ballpark. It’s meant to evoke some sort of melancholic alt-country mood, perhaps bring to mind a desert landscape, you know, with one of those little desert trees placed artfully in the middle. Maybe a lens flare or something. Yeah. Definitely.

But it’s really not very interesting. Semple’s an adept guitar player, but he tends to gravitate toward the same chord progression and style over and over (lots of one-to-four-major-seventh type deals, lots and lots and lots of reverb), occasionally building toward a squall that snaps you out of your beer-in-hand funk, like the end of “Cornerstore.” The major problem is that while the album obviously wants to set a mood, it does so at the expense of varied songwriting, setting every song to the same plodding beat and cavernous guitar. A change in volume or tempo here and there would do wonders for the Bird.

I just can’t work up any degree of excitement for this band. They’re certainly “not bad,” and if you’re an alt-country aficionado, you’ll probably find a lot to love about this record, probably even more so if you smoke and drink heavily and live somewhere in the desert near little desert trees and are used to this kind of thing and long for the days before Wilco got all weird and shit. I hate writing reviews like this, because at least Secretary Bird aren’t wearing eyeliner and girl jeans and screaming, and that’s something. But frankly, even damning Secretary Bird with faint praise seems like too much work. I’m too tired to even muster a shrug.
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Lucas Salg

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 Past Constructive Criticism

Mike Semple posted the following Constructive Criticism: Lucas, I enjoyed your review. I think the end of "Cornerstore" is pretty cool too. A couple years ago a friend of mine swore that girl jeans were the way to go. He, by all accounts, is an average, somewhat masculine guy, so I went to the Gap under his recommendation and tried on a pair. Ya, it didn't work out. It's not that I'm against that sort of open-mindedness, is just that, I don't know, if you have to try that hard, I hardly see the point. And also: I looked rediculous. Keep up the good work. best, Mike