Silversun Pickups Album Recommendations: "Neck of the Woods"

Album Recommendations: Neck of the Woods

The old five-point scale has been retired in favor of just rating stuff 1-10, which allows me a much more nuanced final rating. Still don't take it that seriously. Most of these come from my own collection, so the grades skew rather high. Your results may vary if you send me stuff to review.

Each album is given three Essential tracks, my personal favorites, regardless of how weird and inconsequential they are. The Quintessential pick is the one I think best represents the album as a whole, so you can try one song instead of a whole album of songs. Non-Essential picks range from merely disappointing to outright unlistenable.

Silversun Pickups

[#] Neck of the Woods (2012)

Eerie, warped, and endless.

Reviewed September 10, 2023

This one sure split the base when it came out. Fuzz rock aficionados teaming up with the notoriously exacting Jacknife Lee and his polished production and coming out with an album more skeletal than shoegaze, aesthetically themed after horror films, all synths, dry guitars, tambourines, and eerie harmonies. The gamble paid off in the end, but Silversun's real sonic identity, their tendency towards the explosive and large scale, was never in danger. That winds up being its (slight) downfall as well as its greatest asset; Neck of the Woods feels like the first Pickups record that could use a radio edit.

Not a single song here falls short of four-and-a-half minutes. A lot of that time is used for excellent buildups and sonic mayhem: "Make Believe" has this awesome aggressive guitar strumming leading into a bridge of bent strings and banging snares, "Here We Are"'s sighing vocals and cold drum machines build a fittingly awkward and uncomfortable atmosphere, and "Mean Spirits" is a robotic stampede to soundtrack mutual romantic aggression. Other times, like "The Pit"'s unnecessary fake-out ending or the sonically wonked but musically aimless "Busy Bees", you wish they knew when to call it. Neck of the Woods isn't quite back-to-front flawless like their earlier albums—but that's still head and shoulders above most bands.