Los Angeles based pop-sextet The Little Ones claims to love the craft of sixties pop and to draw on music of that era, but their second album The Dawn Sang Along clearly has more modern influences. There’s a nice touch of The Shins, a heavy dose of Vampire Weekend, and then a good smattering of the recent pop-group Youngblood Hawke. I want to love it—it’s that sort of cacophonous, joyously bright indie pop that’s all tweeting birds and frolicking forest-critters (the band’s bio on Facebook reads like a prologue to a children’s show). Despite shining moments, I can’t help feeling like the territory has been covered in more persevering fashions, and that the album never really comes together as a whole.
“Argonauts” and “Boy on Wheels” are the openers and the highlights. These sunny songs gleam with tropical whimsicality, boasting itchy dance grooves, shiny buoyant vocals, a frivolity of happy background chants, and enough idiosyncratically upbeat melodies to convince you these songs are dying to be featured in a some hip commercial. “Little Souls” and “Forro” are less ornamental but no less happy. “Awol” is a quaint and quirky walk-through-the-park which meanders through pensive verses before twirling into a wonderful maypole-dance sort of climax.
Amongst the hand-clap rhythms, backing choir calls, and bubbly bell-scapes, I also wanted to like “Shake Your Sign,” with its amphitheater-rock intro and submerged, moody echoes. But it quickly lost its initial tone and didn’t seem to have a much of a vision past brief bounces of pop. Similarly, “Catch the Movement” began with a primal pounding and its lyrics spoke to dance motifs, but most of the song’s energy seemed diverted into a lackluster querulousness. Most the remaining tracks struggle with this disunified feel, and cannot quite tie together with the sounds that came before them. At the end of the day it is still good music, but if you, like me, were left somewhat unsatisfied, wanting a similar style but with more emotional upheaval, then make sure to check out the band’s sturdier first album, Morning Tide.
