Eric Saeger
Fresh off a one-song soundtrack appearance in the Winona Ryder vehicle “Sex And Death 101” come North Carolina’s Baumer bearing a drywall-bucket full of curveballs. Rolling out the proceedings is “In Your Stead” (all the song titles seem meant to evince Melville-like seriousness in case people mistook them for an all-growed-up emo band), a rainy wash of guitars, compressed drums and urgent singing common to most all-growed-up emo bands. But what the heck is this “Make Way for the King” song, with its We Love the 80s synth-cheese and ska-like drumming, other than a CYA move in case the 80s end up getting widely loved by everybody, which would, at most, last 20 or 30 minutes?
On the heels of that comes “Hard Drug,” sounding like a Justin Timberlake demo, steeped in plaintive hound-dog crooning and primitive handclaps. Songwriting isn’t a problem for this crew, but focus is — rather than associating themselves with a specific genre or (God forbid) blowing everyone away with originality, Baumer wants to become a warehouse of soundtracking archive soundage waiting around for calls from movie-studio peons, which don’t come often, even to the big fish.
