The Rentals - Lost in Alphaville

But it damn near destroyed Weezer - when asked in an online Q&A a few years later what kept him from completing his infamously unfinished Songs from the Black Hole concept album, Rivers Cuomo answered “ROTR”. Within a couple of years of Return‘s release, Sharp was out of the band. A second Rentals album, Seven More Minutes hitched its wagon to the Britpop star, featuring cameos from members of Elastica, Ash, Lush and Blur, but the label dropped the ball, and decided to release the thing two years after the bubble burst. Since then, Matt Sharp has kept a low profile; a move to Nashville led to a brief excursion into country, then brought back The Rentals with a Kickstarter-backed series of EPs entitled Songs About Time. Now, fifteen years after their last album, Lost in Alphaville marks the real return of The Rentals.

The first thing to point out is that describing what these songs sound like is kinda redundant; it’s all vintage Rentals, with Black Keys drummer Dan Auerbach doing his best to copy Weezer sticksman Pat Wilson’s moves behind the kit. The most fascinating thing about Alphaville is its improbable recasting of this none-more-nineties analog band adrift in a digital world. Album highlight ‘1000 Seasons’ speaks for itself, as Sharp casts a keen eye on memory through the ages, from someone keeping “a diary…an anthology for all the mysteries” to the less romantic modern preoccupation with “all this technology to send apologies.”

The second thing to point out is that, after all those years away, Matt Sharp is still obsessed with time and space - just check those titles: “Seven Years”, “It’s Time to Come Home”, “The Future”. Yet age has brought him an added sense of reflection - there’s less outright joy than on previous Rentals LPs, and the doubt that creeps in is an unsettling new facet in Sharp’s writing. “I’ve written enough, enough for today,” he confesses on “Song of Remembering”, whilst on “Thought of Sound” he claims there’s “nothing more beautiful than the thought of sound” - as if, to actually create sound would destroy that beauty. It’s not so much that Lost in Alphaville sounds like it was picked out of a time capsule buried in 1995; more like Sharp has brought the album out of a fallout shelter with him (remember that terrible Brendan Fraser movie Blast form the Past? I imagine it’s kinda like that) and he’s wary of the world to which he’s actually giving the album.

Ultimately, Alphaville sounds like a confident yet tentative toe back in the water. The backing vocals seem more important than before - like an eighties-era Leonard Cohen album, if it was recorded on the International Space Station - as if Sharp was nervous to carry the album entirely on his own. And as the album’s title suggests, all the tracks are littered with references to not being where you want to be, and wanting to return to the familiar. For Matt Sharp, it just might be that the ‘irrational place’ he pines for midway through the album was the mid-nineties. “Is it crazier to be apart or for us to try again”? he sings on that same song, and while the answer is obviously option A, Lost in Alphaville is sometimes a little too adrift in its own world and its own thoughts of sound to make sense today.

“You’re still with me,” runs the bridge of ‘Seven Years’. “You’re still with me, but I don’t know why.” A little more certainty on the part of its frontman, and maybe he will by the next album.