‘Tho I Seem Tame’ is a title with a raised eyebrow. It makes you want to know what’s being hidden. Song People (Shaina Kapeluck, Darian Scatton and Benjamin Schurr) know the best way to unsettle a listener is to look calm while doing it. Ten songs give the record the poise of a tailored suit. What’s under the suit is the interesting part, and the distance between surface and substance is why this album works. Neither player seems territorial. Instead the instruments pass the spotlight back and forth like a conversation among old friends who finish each other’s sentences. Drake Tyler plays drums on nine of the ten tracks, with Nick Landstrom taking the sticks for “Silver Flag,” and Josh Meakim fills the margins with shakers, tambourine and what the credits charmingly call wizardry. That last word deserves attention. It suggests a person adding small, strange sparkles to the corners of a song, the sort of thing a listener might not notice until it vanishes.
Meakim also mixed the record at Elfland Studios and co-produced it with the band, a pairing that explains the album’s cohesion. A single sensibility seems to be steering the whole vessel, even as three songwriters and two drummers contribute their weight. Recording duties were shared between Meakim, Schurr and Dan Angel, and Ali Jaafar handled mastering. Nothing here sounds hurried or cobbled together. The sequencing in particular has a natural pull, as though someone spent real time deciding which song should lean against which.
“Unwritten Rules” opens the record and the title itself sets a tone of quiet defiance. If you’ve ever had to figure out an office, a family dinner or a party full of strangers, you know the rules nobody spells out are the ones that sting. Starting the album there gives it a point of view without making a speech about it. “The Cone” follows, and its strange, almost cartoonish name keeps the listener guessing. Say “cone” and people picture all sorts of things: traffic warnings, ice cream, party hats, funnels. Song People leave the interpretation open, which is a form of generosity. “The Angel’s Nerve” then pulls toward the mystical, a title that sounds like a diagnosis written in a medieval manuscript.
Midway through, the record settles into its groove. “Mead Hall” conjures the old-world kind of room where stories get told and vows get broken. At four minutes, it sits comfortably next to ‘Touch Me Not,’ a phrase loaded with centuries of religious and romantic baggage. One song invites you in, the other tells you to back off. Few bands think this hard about their titles, and fewer still write music that lives up to them.
“Pile Of Ashes” and “Hematoma” are the album’s rawest pairing. Ashes mean the fire is over and can’t be undone. A hematoma is a bruise, blood trapped under the skin that heals over time. Both are damage, but one is the end of something and the other is what comes after. Put them together and the record feels more physical than its polished surface lets on. These are people who have clearly lived through something and decided to turn the evidence into songs. “Intervene on My Behalf” may be the most vulnerable title on the record. Asking someone to speak up for you takes real nerve. It means admitting your own voice has run out. That puts a lot on Kapeluck as the vocalist, because a plea like this depends on how it’s delivered. She can make it sound like begging, irony, or grace, and whichever she picks shapes everything after it. If you’ve ever needed a friend to say the thing you couldn’t, the title lands before a single note plays.
Then comes the finale. ‘Echoes Only Change’ is almost two minutes longer than any other track on the record, and the length is justified. The band keeps things tight for nine songs and then loosens up. Ending on the longest track shows the restraint was intentional.” And the title is a little sad and a little hopeful: sounds don’t disappear, they just change on the way. That suits a record so concerned with what lingers once the moment is over. Across these ten songs, Song People come off as a band at ease with contradiction. They’re polished and wounded, restrained and expressive, small in scale and big in thought. A less sure group might have shouted to prove it meant business. These three whisper, and it works. The shared keyboard and guitar duties, the guest percussion, the careful mixing all point to musicians who care more about the song than about who gets credit for which flourish.
If you like records that reward close listening, where you decode a title or follow an image from one song to the next, there’s plenty here to dig into. If you just want melody and mood, that’s here too. Either way, ‘Tho I Seem Tame’ proves that calm and harmless aren’t the same thing.
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