2010 has been a rough year for fans of melodic pop-rock with scene luminaries like Lydia, Mae and Copeland all taking their farewell bows. But sometimes a departure merely makes room for something new, exciting, potentially even better. New York trio The Narrative have rushed in to fill the void with their self-titled debut LP, a boldly confident album full of sparkling hooks and stunningly articulate emotional depth.  With nary a dud track in the record’s fifty engrossing minutes, co-founders/songwriters Jesse Gabriel and Suzie Zeldin have crafted one of the best albums of the year.  

The Narrative is an album rife with characters living in the aftermath of love — aching needy souls who wrap themselves in biting bitterness like a shield, pining for the ones who won’t come back and pleading with the ones who just won’t leave, stumbling back into the arms of former lovers fully aware that what might be salvation might also be nothing but a last, desperate mistake. It’s dangerous ground for a pop act to tread — a path littered with the wreckage of a thousand terrible emo bands — but Gabriel and Zeldin navigate the territory with meticulously-crafted subtlety and a deft surety that belies their youth. These are explorations of fully-developed emotions, the sorts of nuanced melancholies and unstable hopes that come with maturity, and The Narritive clearly know their source material well.

Neither of The Narrative’s vocalists sings with a traditionally over-emotive rock voice.  Gabriel’s is smooth and firm, steadying, emotionally restrained but with the faintest hint of a sneer at times. Zeldin’s is more delicate but clear, frequently jumping into the upper register with a piercing ring, airy without being slight. Together, they serve the music well, most of all when they when they begin to layer atop each other.  It’s an approach that carries over into their musicianship, light but deliberate, with Gabriel frequently playing around the notes, snakelike, while Zeldin’s piano fills the empty spaces (when not left purposefully empty — the band clearly knows that emotional depth is as frequently found in the empty holes as in those spaces crammed tight with reverberating oomph.) When they do kick it into high gear, they do so not with an overdriven stomp but rather the sort of building emotional swell that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to a Death Cab For Cutie fan. Drummer Charlie Seich holds the whole affair together with subtly intricate, elusive drumming — little flares of creativity like the extra hit in the chorus of “Cherry Red” and the martial rolls deep in the recesses of “Silence And Sirens’” betray a hidden aptitude reined in by his jazzy but unflashy style.

Though virtually every track on The Narrative stands out in its own way — the bright harmonies of “Fade,” the dark churn of “You Will Be Mine,” the absolutely perfect “ahhh”s floating between the stanzas of “Cherry Red” — the record finds its emotional heart in a pair of tracks. The Zeitlin-sung “Don’t Want To Fall,” a plaintive piano number that would threaten to spiral into torch-song territory under less skilled hands, finds its hero fighting (and losing) a war between heart and head over a still-loved ex.  Gabriel’s “I’ve Been Thinking” (perhaps my favorite song of 2010) takes the other side, its lead deftly reeling in a partner, all too aware of the vulnerability he intends to exploit with his sweet talk. Together, with their twin impulses of desperately taking and desperately giving in, the two songs serve as the flickering binary star at the center of The Narrative, holding the planets in orbit around them.

The album’s final track, “Turncoat,” ends with Gabriel incanting “so baby this is freedom” repeatedly.  And perhaps, for the star-crossed lovers that haunt The Narrative’s emotional purgatory, it will be — but in their world, freedom is just another opportunity to be drawn back in. You know exactly how it will end, but you still can’t help but go back to Track 1 and play it all again.  

*****/*****

*This review was composed by Jesse Richman