Reel Around The Mountain

    Statuesque 

   Arbiters Anonymous

   Cassiel

   There are some people who are just blessed with an endless stream of tunes,
and  Statuesque  singer/guitarist Stephen Manning is one of them. Arbiters
Anonymous, the Surrey, England, trio's first album (following a fabulous EP,
Angleterre, and a couple of singles) is the most compulsively hummable album so 
far this year--Manning's got a huge arsenal of non-obvious harmonic moves, and
there's always a hook around the corner, as well as one coming up from behind
and another sneaking down from the ceiling. The effect is very much like what
would happen if Guided By Voices bothered to finish most of their songs: retro
by virtue of singability and reliance on the good old guitar/bass/drums
warhorse.

   Manning seems too great to have come completely out of the blue, and in fact 
he hasn't--he's been working out this stuff on tape since the early '90s.
Arbiters starts with "Redivider," a five-year-old song that Manning originally
recorded with his old band Molecular. The Molecular version is draggy,
uncertain, gussied up with some synth strings and vocal affectations that make
it sound like a minor Sarah Records release.  Statuesque  plays it straight,
cleanly and confidently, focusing attention on Manning's voice singing "The
question is not do I call/But do I leave these fist marks in the wall" and
sounding a little like  Morrissey.  That's mostly because Manning is a slightly 
effete British guy who gets loud and proud with his natural accent (instead of
trying to follow the rock tradition of pretending he's from the American
Deep-South), and plays up to it, giving the last word in a line a distinctly
Morrisseyan grace note, or drolly over-enunciating a phrase like "tragedy in

   The other way in which the Smiths' legacy manifests itself in  Statuesque  is
a little more unfortunate: Manning's lyrics are badly  Morrissey -damaged, with 
a wrist-to-forehead tone and one tragic almost-sequitur after another. From "I'm
A Blasphemer": "The criminal act of love/Still, now, Victorian moral fog/The new
inmate who twigs it too late/The criminal actor will recant it never/But insider
outsider two selves sever." Manning is his own Johnny Marr, though, and he's
smart enough to bury his singing under some cleverly wrought bit of jangle
whenever the words get too dismal. That's what keeps Arbiters working; even its 
weaker songs sound interesting. The band can pull out bombastic, glistening
production when it's called for, but one of the highlights of the album,
"Already Seen," is four minutes of Manning buzzing and whacking through a sea of
hiss; when the opening of "The Winning the Taking Part" leaps up right after it,
it's as startling as a Roman candle on a starless night. So pretend most of the 
songs just go "la la la," and they'll be a lot more fun when you find them stuck
in your head. (Douglas Wolk)