Search - the Lonelyhearts :: Disaster Footage at Night

Ambitious and consistent, Disaster Footage at Night is a great second album. The record finds the Lonelyhearts getting a bit more aggressive than their intimate and well-received debut, Dispatch. Disaster Footage is both concise and expansive, featuring some of the band's shortest and tightest songs as well as epics that stretch out with grand structures. Yet the band's primary strengths - simple but intriguing melodies and daring lyricism - remain intact. The musical palette is varied: once defined by acoustic guitars and airy synths, here they also employ distorted guitars and crunchy organs. The narratives cover a lot of ground, too: gender-swapping in Tennessee, post-war trauma, star-crossed love affairs on the alternately drug-fueled and bourgeois streets of the Bay Area, and getting inside the head of the sole black member of the Duke University lacrosse team. Everything is fair game on Disaster Footage at Night.