The Stills
Without Feathers

Vice 2006


It was a bad move to bypass Logic Will Break Your Heart. That 2003 debut full-length remains erroneously bunched with the preceding year’s Turn on the Bright Lights. Yet, for all the melancholy, it broke to embody a hopeful expanse in sound and craft that is still definitive and wonderful. Logic killed you slowly, leaving the Stills to surf and strum hungrily over a ‘scape of ponds and ponderous escape. It’s lovers’-music pre-post-breakup, knowing you’re never going to feel an oh-that again, though goals mockingly saunter to odd fruition. It lives out a night in a city’s downstairs bar where fucked-up energy, passion and attitude all swim inside, leading you to bed and leading you to rise, with a perfect girl and jean pockets of lovely pills. But like 2003’s Echoes, the other people just weren’t ready.

Without Feathers is grown and sexy and inflated with thinking. “It’s nice to see you’re moving on / I know it’s hard moving on / It’s just never what it was.” This is settling down music at a time when it’s not needed. It should come packaged with suspenders, a cubicle and an airbrushed portrait of pre-toupe Elton John. The stable critics are eating up the “change,” and a few prematurely married couples (24?) will dig this rubbing on CHUD stomachs, but play Logic and Without Feathers and see which makes you want to make a swervy drive to an ex for some summer yelling and slapping and which makes you call in sushi-delivery, or step outside for a smoke and look at the condo construction and say, “It’s boring time, I’ve got a 40K job.” The Stills are mighty comfortable with their introspective Pinkerton, but it’s time to get busy concentrating on death at 30 (while it's not scary as shit).

-Hunter Stephenson