Dislocations

Album Review

On their third album, the Silence Kit continue to explore the vein of gently propulsive, moody rock with a distinctly 1980s feeling that the group has pursued from the get-go. As with their previous work, the balance between reinvention and pastiche is sometimes a bit thin — not for nothing does "Bad Months" start out sounding exactly like a Cure song from their Disintegration/Wish heyday. That being acknowledged, there are moments throughout Dislocations that rank among the group's best, including the inspiring chorus of "Let There Be No Hurt," which starts the album, and the tight pep of "The Magician." At its brightest and best, Dislocations captures a sense not of head-nodding reverence but sudden bursting energy — the quality that helped define performers like Adrian Borland and Mark Burgess as antithetical to a perceived too-cool-for-school approach, here exemplified by vocalist Patrick McCay on songs like "Five Seconds," while he rides the slow swing of "Your Mistakes" with both an easy grace and a sense of counting down to a final reckoning. Meanwhile, it's not a permanent Reagan/Thatcher world in the sonics — the slow, chugging start to "Fire Escapes" suggests the quieter moments of grunge's commercial peak.