Nada Surf - The Weight Is a Gift

On fourth album The Weight Is a Gift, Nada Surf amble into impending senescence with hope, poise, and a similarly complex relationship toward the prosaic. The New York trio's 30-something members now bear dual millstones around their necks: Not just 1996 MTV Buzz Clip "Popular", but also the spacious, Death Cab for Cutie-influenced indie-pop of 2003 Barsuk debut Let Go. While The Weight Is a Gift lacks its predecessor's bird's-eye introspection and moments of near-sublimity, it's another often-compelling set of melancholic post-Coldplay guitar-pop, made grittily optimistic by the tribulations of post-hipster existence.
It's these burdens that have set Nada Surf free. The band will never be accused of defying clichés, but it has survived on an ability to subtly add color to them. Where "Popular" was itself a bratty string of high-school stereotypes, the more modest success of Let Go served, if not to erase the truism "one-hit wonder," at least to add a middle option. Yeah, "Blonde on Blonde" absconded with a better songwriter's poetry, but singer Matthew Caws' forlorn falsetto and graceful scene-setting made the loving theft believable; "Inside of Love" was pretty much what you'd expect, done better than we had any right to expect.
The Weight Is a Gift is a sad album that acknowledges that, hey, maybe the bourgeois solecisms that flow so cheaply from others' lips really do have meaning-- and that gives it hope. Upbeat opener "Concrete Bed" tosses out itchy acoustic guitars and clunky rhymes like "ossified"/"fried" before building into a potentially laughable chorus, "To find someone you love/ You gotta be someone you love." Yet Caws' subject already knows this, he says, concluding, "You've gotta call your own bluff." Third track "Always Love" offers a similarly simple sentiment and acoustic guitars that unsurprisingly build into chunky power-pop. Here, too, however, Caws isn't just childishly mouthing something he's overheard; he's coming to terms with a voice he's ignored.

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