Squabbler

Squabbler’s The Wind Among the Reeds is a rare artifact of comfortable midtempo instrumental indie rock. Typically, instrumental music deviates in style or structure from more traditional pop fare – using instruments to provide a primary melody in vocals’ place, or unleashing highly technical instrumentation and/or odd time signatures to capture a listener’s attention, or building mood via ambience to transport the listener. Squabbler’s a different instrumental beast. These ten tunes are firmly ensconced in the sonic tropes of traditional indie-pop: fuzzy lo-fi production, nice and easy dynamics and predictable chord progressions, standard instrumentation (guitar, bass, drums, keys). Vocals wouldn’t feel out of place on any of these tracks, yet nothing feels like it's missing. Despite avoiding the calling cards of both instrumental music and pop, Squabbler’s songs manage to bridge the gap while being both captivating and rewarding.

 

Many of these tracks are exercises in layering – rather than rising and falling dynamically, they depend on shifting complexity to generate momentum. The first three songs implement quirky and whimsical sound effects to keep the listener on their toes. Bubbly synths on “Saccharine Streams” are reminiscent of “Fantasma” era Cornelius, though Squabbler never gives in to bombast. Opener “Ephemeral” fuzzes out the chorus but keeps the mood light, like the least precious version of Grandaddy. Chord progressions are straightforward and predictable, but delivered with an off-kilter warble that prevents them from sounding mundane. The middle section of the album turns slightly darker, with the fuzzed out guitars taking a more central position and hinting at shoegaze. The dynamics remain sturdy and consistent, in particular the drumming and tempos. The third act deviates slightly, with new instrumentation and time signatures, but Squabbler never seems to push a song out of its comfort zone. 

 

There’s a cumulative effect to so many songs in the same tempo and dynamic register not unlike that of a DJ’s set, one song blending into another for a sustained experience. This collective impact is aided by the brevity of the songs – the average length is right around two minutes. Songs don’t flow directly into one another and are easily distinguishable, but the sum of their parts surpasses the impact of the songs individually. Which is to say that as an album, The Wind Among the Reeds succeeds. As individual songs, these tracks spend their time somewhere between attention-grabbers and background music. It seems this is Squabbler’s greatest strength – to be unassuming enough to provide a blank backdrop when needed, but to offer enough reasons to warrant a closer listen and be interesting enough to make it worthwhile.