Little Kingdom, the latest record from Citay, is serene, euphoric, pastoral – have I gotten in enough of the All Music Guide adjectives yet? – oh, and flamingly hippie. Sure, Ezra Feinberg hails from San Francisco; sure, he’s toured with Vetiver; sure, the one-sheet included with the promo calls out to Mike Oldfield, Big Star, and acoustic Zeppelin. But, really, this record is so hippie. In fact, it sometimes sounds like the work of a suburban hippie obsessive yearning for the Grateful Dead era that came along a hair’s breadth too early for him to see, like the sort of thing that would’ve found favor on the quasi-anarchic FM radio stations of the ‘70s.
That makes Little Kingdom simultaneously a quintessential product of the present and about as un-punk as a thing could possibly be. The irony is that a group like Citay would have had nowhere to go in the pop world of the last decade, precisely because punk hadn’t yet succumbed to its long, thrashing death-by-dilution. They aren’t just totally retro; they’re actually of-a-part with a musical movement that was verboten for nearly 30 years. And there’s plenty here for the alt-rock blackshirts to find objectionable: bubbly plucking, noodly solos, positive vibes, an appalling jigsaw of trad guitar effects applied to nearly everything, plus violins, flutes, and synthesizers. The vocals, when present, appear to consist entirely of breathy sincerities and bits of indistinct vocalese – appropriate for music that exists to be projected upon and to supply the listener with little apart from mood and atmosphere.
Actually, that’s where things get double-edged; Little Kingdom sometimes drifts so far into mood-and-atmosphere that it begins to merge with that boundless gray world occupied by various forms of wallpaper music. There are no turns toward full-on smooth jazz or anything like that, but occasionally things threaten to get pretty banal – such as on “A Riot of Color,” one of a handful of songs that doesn’t go much further than its title. Sometimes, Citay address these tendencies with nifty arrangement tricks, such as the faux-harpsichord that concludes the title track. Other times, they centerpiece an inexplicable flair for the sort of harmonized-guitar solos that wouldn’t sound out-of-place on something by Blue Öyster Cult. Such diversions periodically jog the band out of its chuggin’ major-key rut, but Citay still spend more time in the rut than out of it. Many listeners will doubtlessly find it a noodlingly inoffensive one, but it remains that a certain lack of intentionality is evident throughout Little Kingdom and significantly weakens its impact.
More about: Citay
