Film School’s follow-up to last year’s self-titled effort successfully busts out of the confines of the shoegaze genre. Awash in rich vocals and punctuated rhythms, Hideout sounds nothing like its cocooned namesake. In fact, Film School’s latest effort not only breaks out of the confines of the shoegaze genre, but reveals a band reinvented and reincarnated with a new lineup and sound. For the most part, the San Francisco quintet has discarded the goth posturings found nestled in swathes of reverb and loops on earlier releases, and replaced them with a sound rooted in a more conventional pop structure. 


At first, the My Bloody Valentine guitar grumbles on opener “Dear Me” sound rather routine until the skittering percussion and towering rhythm guitars crest at the minute mark. Greg Berten’s broken and commanding vocals tear through the uproar with the thematic lines, “we can hide out / we can hide here too / it will take us back to me and you.” Alongside Berten’s lead singing many of the new vocal additions add to Film School’s pulsing rhythms and textured ambiance. The eddying vocals of bassist Lorelei Plotczyk on “Florida” and “Compare” infuse decadent nostalgia to their ghostly chamber pop electronics.

Hideout’s mid-section leans towards ‘80s pop balladry with the heartbreaking love song ”Two Kinds” and the harpsichord tinged sweeper “Go Down Together.” The album breaks out of that mold when Jesus and Mary Chain chainsaw riffs fuzz everything on closer “What I Meant To Say.” Alongside the new experiments are moments when the old psychedelic interstellar rock of past Film School efforts zooms into focus (“Sick Hipster Nursed By A Suicide Girl”) only to be grounded in the terrestrial by the jackhammer rhythms on the well-named “Lectric.” The guitars scorch across the sky, leaving slashes and burn marks as they go.

Those burns feel all the more corporeal on a release that fully tracks the emotions of a caged mind without sounding blinkered. Film School has not only done this with Hideout, but also crafted its strongest album to date.
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Links
Film School [official site] [myspace]