Department of Eagles -Archive 2003-2006

Thu 29th Jul, 2010 in Music Reviews

This album is the sound of a band finding its feet. This album is an ellipsis, a gap filled, the missing chapter in one of the most interesting and unlikely musical stories of recent years; the story of Department of Eagles.

Daniel Rossen and Fred Nicolaus first began collaborating as college dorm roommates at NYU in 2000. Three years later they released an odd, enjoyable set of electronic pop under the moniker Whitey on the Moon UK.

In 2005, the duo changed its name to Department of Eagles and began work on their sophomore album. But with recording sessions proving frustrating, and Rossen’s “side project”, a little known Brooklyn four-piece named Grizzly Bear well and truly taking off, the DOE project was put on indefinite hiatus.

Thankfully the duo reconvened to create In Ear Park, a swooning, achingly beautiful record of art folk and one of 2008’s best releases.
As the name suggests Archive compiles all of the demos and sketches from the aborted recording sessions between DOE’s debut LP in 2003 and their temporary dissolution in 2006.

It is easy to dismiss a compilation like this as the product of a band without any new ideas, or a cash grab from their record label. These suspicions were not allayed by the album’s liner notes, written by Nicolaus, in which he admits, “in truth, they [the songs on the album] would never have been released at all if it weren’t for a contractual obligation to the label that first released our music.”

However, much like other B-side albums such as Sufjan Stevens’ The Avalanche, the quality of the songs on Archive does not expose a band with a dearth of ideas, but rather displays a band brimming with them.

While Archive lacks the symphonic grandeur of In Ear Park, the stately instrumentation and bare compositions contain a subtle power, like the jittery Brightest Minds or the piano ballad Golden Apple.

For a compilation, Archive flows incredibly smoothly, laying out a musical map charting DOE’s progression from the electronic experimentation of their early work to the winsome, intricate folk of In Ear Park.

Many moments on the album signpost the direction that the duo would take in the future. The banjo melody underpinning the meandering Deadly Disclosure eventually became In Ear Park’s closer Balmy Night. The brittle guitar work on While We’re Young is as obvious a template as any for Rossen’s eventual output in Grizzly Bear’s austere masterpiece Veckatimest.

Obviously some of the songs are a little underdeveloped. The five Practice Room Sketches that intersperse the album, are little more than ambient tinklings and rushed off the cuff recordings, but in a way, this roughness adds a certain charm to the album.

Archive is as much about the creative process as it is about the final product, and DOE capture the strike of that first tentative chord, the breathless snatches of lyric, which are the initial building blocks of a song.

Rossen and Nicolaus have stated in interviews that In Ear Park was likely to be their final collaboration together, so Archive can be viewed as an epilogue of sorts, a collection of songs to tie their sound together, at least until a new chapter is written.