The Wake

Clocking in at 35 minutes, The Plastic Constellations’ Crusades is a ten-song disc with a single mindset. Complex guitar riffs, capricious song structures and the occasional hook cause the listener to drift through the CD, almost without noticing when one song ends and the next begins. The only problem: They all start to sound the same after about 15 minutes.

A local success story, the Plastic Constellations have been playing and recording together since high school. They garnered national recognition with their second release, 2004’s Mazatlan. In their music, fast guitars meet unintelligible lyrics in a way that’s not quite prog rock and not quite punk.

Crusades, as far as I can tell, is a modern-day mythology, giving the nod of the cap to Don Quixote (see the song of the same name) and simultaneously to the band’s Midwestern roots (“But for the rest, we’re just stuck in East St. Paul / We never rest, we skip spring and summer, head straight to the fall”). My grievance is that most of this is lost in the yelps and wails through which the words are delivered.

In the end, Crusades is a steady, homogenous album with few stand out moments. The Plastic Constellations are a talented group of musicians, but they need to move outside their comfort zone if they want to avoid stagnation and predictability.