Piebald returns with sixth studio album

Artist: Piebald
Album: Accidental Gentleman
Label: Side One Dummy
Release Date: January 23, 2007.
Rating: 4.5/7

Piebald are about as white they come. Their lead singer is an anorexic adult with emo glasses, their albums include one entitled If It Weren’t for Venetian Blinds, It Would be Curtains for Us, and their music is emo/indie rock with some blues, piano, and irony thrown in for good measure.

But being uber-white isn’t necessarily a bad thing-It worked for Benny Goodman and Buddy Holly, Weezer on the Blue Ablum, and it worked for Piebald on We are the Only Friends That We Have. The aforementioned album mixed catchy guitar hooks, quirky songwriting, tongue in check humor tempered by some sentimentality and Travis Shettel’s raspy yet melodic voice.

After 2004’s mediocre follow-up, All Ears, All Eyes, all the time, Piebald returns with their sixth studio album, 2007’s Accidental Gentleman . Sticking to a mix of radio-friendly indie/punk rock with the occasional piano and idiosyncratic songwriting, Accidental Gentleman is a good but not great album. The band focuses enough on hooks and mixing up tempos within songs and throughout the album to keep the disc listenable.

The album starts off with the appropriately (or lazily) chosen “Opener,” a standard fare rocker with some rolling bass, organ, and power chords. Following closely is the first single and video from the album, “Friend of Mine.” One of the catchier and better written songs on the album, “Friend of Mine” showcases Piebald’s songwriting at its best, with some catchy driving indie rock, solid piano lines, and mock serious lines like “There are no longer any renaissance men, in our age of quick achievements/ I’ve got a friend who knows what living is, and he knows just what to do.”

After the midtempo “Don’t Tell Me Nothing” and “There’s Always,” Piebald switch it up with the piano friendly, slow(in relative terms) ballad “Stranger.” The upbeat standout “Oh the Congestion” follows, succeeded by the mediocre trio of “Shark Attack,” “On and On,” and “Getting Mugged and Loving it.” Next up is a Piebald trademarked track, “Life on the Farm,” which finds the band switching tempos and Shettel dreaming about living on a farm, where he and his friends will “Work on a tractor, but mostly just ride our bikes.”

One of the best hooks on the album occurs on the upbeat “Nature Wins,” though the song manages to seem to drag on, even at a brisk play time of three minutes. After the rambling piano-centric “Roll On,” which once again finds Shettel salivating over his bike (“Hey, yeah, it’s sunny outside/So let’s go ride our bikes”), the album closes with “Untitled,” either a perfect bookend for “Opener” or just plain laziness in the naming department. Perhaps the song should have been entitled “Incomplete” because about three minutes in Piebald break into a rockin bridge/buildup that leads to…an abrupt end to the song. How disappointing.