Sin Ropas must get sick of having Califone mentioned in every review they receive. They’re supposedly, after all, the equal-but-opposite force that tore Red Red Meat (a group now more frequently referred to as a ‘collective’) into multiple pieces. No one wants to be the Son Volt to anyone else’s Wilco. Still, that’s how they’ve been portrayed: if Califone were the brains of Red Red Meat, Sin Ropas were the guts. And enough voices made a point of preferring Fire Prizes’ endless wave of entrails to Califone’s dense cerebrum, as if that said as much about the musicians as the listener. Point is, since Califone never pulled off massive, earthy guitars as well as they always seemed to want to, Sin Ropas felt like a snipped — incredibly badass but understandably incomplete — idea. The bands make sense held up next to each other, but they certainly don’t occupy the same niche.
But did everyone who ‘preferred’ Sin Ropas to Califone (again, as if that matters) feel this way because Sin Ropas were that much more content to ride out the waves? Does it make sense for them to try to become a ‘complete’ band? Because for better or worse, and I can join all the critics at fault here, their first album in five years kind of matches step with Califone — Sin Ropas want to be a band to live by, not just a hankering.
Mostly this comes in little Deckian teases — liquidy vocal harmonies, the delicate tape loop behind “Folded Uniforms,” the drum-machine-backed swagger of “Nailed in Air” — but sometimes it hits harder: I don’t think any of us figured that Tim Hurley could really rise as a melodic entity out of the swamp, much less belt a yearn the way he does on “Unchanged the Lock.” It’s the shortest of the mostly-shorter songs on a much shorter album; turns out the duo can actually be really tight songwriters. In fact, a lot of the album is to-the-point, which I can already see indignant fans who’d rather hear an eight-minute song unravel into sheer sound, but it’s also nice to have melodies resonate after the album’s done. The melodies last longer than the actual songs do, and that’s a lot more valuable in execution than in theory — the only time I’m remotely disappointed by this album is when it’s not playing.
One element no one oughta complain about is how stellar the production is, which is obvious as soon as the first guitar in “The Fever You Fake” hits the solar plexus. Every crumbly guitar is delicately engineered for its own resonance and punch, a specificity that was sorely absent from Fire Prizes’ fractal noodles. But if sound enhances the fist-pumpers, it actively rescues some of the sleepier moments. “Stolen Stars and Light,” for example, could have drowsily squandered the majesty of the first three tracks if it didn’t introduce an incredible drone of atonal strings halfway through. It’s the sort of stuff you could listen to forever, but most of Holy Broken feels, in the best possible way, like stuff you already have been listening to forever.
This is where the guts thing comes back: despite the occasional whiff of formaldehyde, Sin Ropas still never come off as calculated or inorganic. Instead, treat their taut songwriting and detailed sound as a natural regeneration, salamander-tail-style, one that’s been a long time coming.