Consonant's Consonant

Onstage with Mission of Burma at Irving Plaza last winter, bassist Clint Conley exuded wide-eyed amazement and copious amounts of sweat. More than the other middle-aged men alongside him, Conley made a charged circuit with the audience, clearly getting off on the excitement of the sold-out crowd as it got off on him. His age mattered in the sense that you could see him working hard physically, almost struggling against his own limitations in a way I'd imagine wasn't evident when the band played out 20 years ago. But Conley's earthbound qualities heightened his appeal. He looked like a man who'd have pinched himself to make sure he wasn't dreaming if he hadn't been too busy singing some of the band's best songs and holding things together with his bass work.

Or maybe Conley looked like a guy just waking up from a dream, a longish one in which he gave up music, got married, raised children and had a career as a tv producer. (All of which are apparently intact at this writing.) In the presskit for his new band and self-titled album it says that preparations for the MoB reunion stirred something in Conley?he found himself up late at night writing music for the first time in years, then got himself some collaborators. Just like the re-formed Mission of Burma, Consonant is better than skeptical fans?if that's not a contradiction?might expect, though it's not without certain moments of stiffness.

Conley has teamed up with Chris Brokaw (formerly of Come, Codeine and Steve Wynn), Matt Kadane (Bedhead) and Winston Braman (Fuzzy), and the album is produced by Bob Weston (Shellac). Much of the music here?the surging guitars, the dissonance?is perhaps overly familiar. It's still effective, though, a bit like the blues, a kind of stiff-by-definition but pleasurably familiar version of country music. The songs here are often more driving, with more sense of forward motion, than many Mission of Burma numbers. Besides Conley the other link between the two bands is poet Holly Anderson, who co-wrote the lyrics for "Mica" on Vs. as well as about two-thirds of the song lyrics here. Anderson's role on Consonant is ambiguous?obviously, she's a major part of the album, but in the sleeve photo she seems to be hiding behind the four guys who play the music. I mean I think it's her, because there's a person standing there who looks like a woman, but I can't tell for sure.

So we've got aging indie-rockers, lyrics written by a poet and a kind of cheesy cover (young woman in pink dress who has nothing to do with anything else, rather demurely dressed for such a role). Consonant surprises with the rightness of its sound and a witty, rueful charm that balances its darker, moodier traits. The poem-lyrics reveal flickering frames from movies of relationships past. I may be reading too much into them, but there certainly seem to be several different relationships here?young people together, an older person with a younger one, passionate encounters, cheating, rivals, memories, doubts: "Maybe we happened and maybe we didn't at all." There's a sense of experience and lessons learned (and not learned) over time, making Consonant more reminiscent of a country song like George Jones' "Color of the Blues" than "Academy Fight Song."

Whether the experience is Conley's, Anderson's or both, I don't think it could have come from a precocious and jaded young rocker. It's hard to shake the sensation that this kind of rock is by definition a nostalgia act, but nostalgia, though culturally exaggerated and exploited, is a natural and real emotion. Consonant is a nostalgia act in the sense that its words and sounds look backward, but the band doesn't pretend that time hasn't passed.

Anderson's poems are memorable when sung in Conley's quavery voice, but some of the better songs are Conley's work alone. "Call It L?," "The Kiss" and "Perfect" have a more biting, playfully humorous and less nostalgic sensibility, with lyrics that question romantic moments rather than paying homage to them. "So just what do you call this thing/That we can't touch or it would bring/Our whole worlds crashing down." "Stop, take a sec, look around/Did she see me in your car?" They're different musically too?lighter, jauntier, a bit rollicking, more like traditional rock and pop. "The Kiss" even has wonderfully light-hearted Beatlesque harmonies, courtesy of Weston, that I can't imagine appearing on a Mission of Burma album.