Soft Speaker‘s first full-length, I’ll Tend Your Garden, is remarkably good. Yes, that just spoiled the surprise and probably ruined any suspense this review may have had in store. It’s just that there is no reason to tiptoe around the obvious. Rarely has an album grabbed my attention this early and held it this often. I’ll Tend Your Garden is such a mix of influences but sounds unlike most of them on the surface.

Maybe perceived influences is a better way of putting it because, although I have confirmation that both Neil Young and Dinosaur Jr. are at least beloved by Soft Speaker singer Paul Foreman, the fact that I also hear Radiohead and Hawkwind in the mix is all on me. You might come up with two or three of your own. The fact that you can’t truly point to any particular song and claim it’s the Radiohead song or Neil Young song is all their doing. It’s also a safe bet none of them own a Hawkwind record.

And maybe you can point to opener “Hawk Mountain Line” as the most Radiohead-ish of the bunch. Foreman’s vocals do warble a bit in a Thom Yorke way. Rest assured it is The Bends-era Radiohead, so guitars rule the day. In fact, I’ll Tend Your Garden is surprisingly full of guitar antics. It is arena-ready in the best possible sense. Take the next track “Three Beggars,” for instance. It’s seven-plus minutes and full of looping bass lines and squealing guitars. I should mention that Foreman shares vocal duties here with Nick Rocchio – who sings on “Three Beggars” – the Morrissey to Foreman’s Yorke if the comparisons are necessary.

Foreman’s songs might sound more spacey and Rocchio’s a bit more maudlin, but the band’s sound doesn’t sway too much one way or the other from song to song. That sound? It’s bold. It’s very guitar centric. It might be space rock but it might be Brit pop.

“For A Handsome Price,” despite starting out eerily like “We Got The Beat,” ends up wrapping a Hawkwind-like riff around some precious vocals. Again, the band let the second half of the song ride a nice little bass line while the guitars solo over each other. It’s a pleasure just trying to describe it.

For good measure, Soft Speaker even throw in a little Afro-pop picking on “Penny, Wait For Me,” a song that sounds like David Byrne fronting Television. Or I could be grasping at straws trying to figure this all out. One can throw out many so-and-so-fronting- this-and-that but really this album sounds distinctively Soft Speaker. That’s why I grew more impressed with the record after each listen.

Maybe a Dinosaur Jr. reference isn’t all that far off. Dinosaur took indie rock and gave it some classic guitar soloing, something at that point that was quite antithesis to the scene. Soft Speaker seem to be doing the same for Brit pop. Radiohead once upon a time made Brit pop rock. Soft Speaker make it space out and then rage with some ferocious guitar work. It’s this oxymoron that captivates. This probably isn’t helping too much, but hopefully you’ll take away that Soft Speaker have given us something pretty bold and rather stellar.
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