Music Review: The Mary Onettes, Portico:

By Less Lee Moore

The Mary Onettes’ new release, Portico: is dense with almost claustrophobic layers of synths and jangling guitars. But singer Philip Ekström’s voice has a lighter touch and floats above the music, which gives depth to these songs. Portico: reminds me a lot of The Cure’s Disintegration at times, but far more restrained and condensed. Ekström has an emotive warble like Robert Smith even while sounding almost nothing like him. He talks about death and ghosts and dreaming, all of which fit the music like a hand in a glove. There are choruses and bridges everywhere, both instrumental and vocal, which propel the songs forward, and out of the heaviness that might otherwise weigh them down.

Opening track “Silence Is A Gun” is immediately engaging, but The Mary Onettes have even more to offer. “Naïve Dream” has that sort of running movement that the best jangley shoegaze songs from the ’80s had. The chorus is dreamy, especially when Ekström hits a falsetto that fades into an echo, beautifully complemented with some celestial harmonies.

“Ritual Mind” is much slower, laced through with an instrument that sounds like a rubber band being stretched and snapped while “Everything Everything” includes a sampled dialogue in the background, enhancing its dreamlike quality. It’s another song that evokes the feeling of traveling forward, with a bit of bounce in the main beat, along with synthesized handclaps and bursts of drums.

“Your Place” is a standout. It gathers all the best qualities of The Mary Onettes’ music and pours them into one song, with great, soaring vocals and a feeling verging on heartbreak.

The droney, somnambulant “Bells For Stranger” has a long instrumental intro and more of that rubber band guitar sound with a long outro that’s like swimming through water, space, or unconsciousness. The final and title track is an instrumental, and should have been used as the theme music to the new Cosmos series with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Its sampled conversation track, which sounds like it was recorded on a busy street corner, adds an earthly dimension to the proceedings.

A portico is an Italian term for a porch that leads to the entrance of a building, one with a roof over a walkway. The Mary Onettes might think of this mini-album as a collection of songs that bridge the gap between their 2013 album Hit The Waves and whatever they have planned for the future. Yet, Ekström notes that he’s “in love with the idea of a constant flow of albums where you never know what’s going to come next.” Hopefully, they’ll take the sonic palette they’ve explored here even further.

Portico: was released on March 4 from Labrador.