All City Affairs - Identity Theft

Genre rock Publisher Lujo Records

As the man behind All City Affairs, whose second album, Identity Theft, Peter Andreadis shows a sense of vocal melody indebted, for its emphasis on clarity, warmth, and plainness, to the mellow pop of the seventies.  When he sings "Chicago's got that noose around me," he's not just feeling the squeeze of the city he lives in—I imagine he's also talking about the baseball-team-sized classic rock band he’s hung up on.

Like Baby Teeth—another Chicago-dwelling, Chicago-like band, whose drummer is the same Peter Andreadis—ACA explores the sounds of its influences so as to surprise and refresh them, matching those rounded easy-listening vocal lines to instrumentals with new muscle and edge.  But whereas Baby Teeth takes a sad song and makes it proggy, ACA roots its approach in West Coast hip-hop and the sanctity of the groove.  Two chords are usually enough for Andreadis.  This isn’t the kind of music that wobbles or wanders; this is the kind of music that’s supposed to stay put.

Andreadis isn’t a virtuosic player (accordingly he isn’t a technically demanding songwriter) and he’s a passable but limited singer.  He gets his best results when he goes in for lush, full arrangements, in which the whole can supply whatever radiance is lacked by the generic parts hidden in the mix.

The theme of the placidly beautiful opening track, for example—the song is called “Flashback To When We Both Were Young”—is as simple as can be.  It’s a major fourth, just the same two pitches trading beats at unvaried tempo for four minutes.  And yet, because the theme continually involves new instrumental voices, it has its own kind of variety: over the quiet timekeeping of a rhythm guitar and a drum machine, those two notes are sounded a thousand ways.  The sound is cozy and enveloping, achieving a richness of texture that compares capably to the techno-balladeering of Handsome Furs or the Flaming Lips.  Other highlights of the album, which show similar strengths, include “So Much Control,” with its chorus of otherworldly ooohs, and the organ-powered, reverb-drenched “Different When We’re Alone.”

In the more sparsely mixed songs, Andreadis the singer and lyricist suffers from increased exposure; without his oceans of synthesizer, he’s a fish out of water, and the songs—about half of them—have a flat, unfinished feel.  He has a reedy, brittle singing voice and a very bad habit of aborting his phrases by falling off of the last note into a tuneless croak.  (To an extent Andreadis succeeds in masking this problem, but only when he doubles the lead vocal.)  As a lyricist, he’s still on uncertain terms with his love of rap music.  No—let me put it more directly than that: he overuses the word “fuck.”  I’d love to congratulate the line “You were so fuckin’ hot and my best friend / had to pinch myself that this was real and not pretend” as bringing a new standard of sexual earnest to the mid-tempo love song, but this is 2008: Ben Folds has covered Dr. Dre, and that ship has sailed.