Combinations is the second album from siblings-and-cousins Texan combo Eisley. The three female members all contribute vocals and produce, in general, a lush, rich harmonious noise between them. Judging by their performance at this year’s Reading Festival, it seems that their full sound is, indeed, organic, and not a product of studio tinkering – they managed to replicate it impressively when singing/playing live.

There’s a quite pronounced 70s vibe to proceedings, often sounding folky, on, for example, the portentous opener Many Funerals, or the soft rock Taking Control, which sounds a bit Stevie-Nicks-era-Fleetwood Mac, or even quite countrified – witness the steel guitar sounds on Golly Sandra.

The strength of this album is undoubtedly in the singing. On tracks like Taking Control, Go Away and Golly Sandra they’ve a lovely way of overlapping and melding the vocals together – sort of as if they were singing a “round” – that works really well. There’s an change in utiliation of their voices too. From using a single singing voice, on title track Combinations, to using three-part harmonies. The downside of this, perhaps, is that all three singers sound pretty much indistinguishable from each other, which can leave the listener occasionally craving a bit more variety.

The best tracks are Invasion (possibly written about the US TV programme of the same name?), which nicely produces a sense of impending doom, Go Away where a sense of regretful melancholia is successfully conveyed by both the lyrics and the accompanying wistful-sounding melody, and the aforementioned Combinations.

Lyrically, however, they often frustrate. The more straightforward tracks work best, but on rather more of the songs than not, the lyrics are opaque to the point of incoherence, with the occasional non-sequitur thrown in. A good example is in Ten Cent Blues where they sing, confusingly, about how “my stilts, they began cracking, subsequently pushed”, although they also use this lovely (and successfully) description of one character: “she’s such a mouse/with such an abstract grace”. Similar problems in Come Clean and Marvellous Things (“Oh what marvellous things/But they are, they are, they are, they are, giving me the creeps”) prevent one from ever getting a clear handle on what the songs are really about, or even what mood they are trying to convey. This is a pity, and prevents the listener from wholeheartedly engaging with them.

Overall then this is probably one to recommend for those of you who are more interested in how an album sounds than what it says, and who like their music sweet and tuneful. It’s hard to shake off a feeling that a bit more grit to the sound, and a bit more meaning to the words, could have produced a work of much more depth and enduring interest.
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Links
Eisley [official site] [myspace]