Sin Ropas - Holy Broken (2010)

Red Red Meat called it quits in 1997, but it wasn't your typical breakup. For one thing, the members all kept playing together. More importantly, each project that sprang up in the band's orbit and wake-- including Loftus, Califone, Orso, and Sin Ropas, as well as a lot of Brian Deck's production work-- carried on and expanded the band's aesthetic, making it a major part of the Chicago sound over the past decade. So Red Red Meat didn't so much die as fractalize. Sin Ropas, the project of former Red Red Meat bassist Tim Hurley, hasn't been as prolific as Califone, to which Hurley sometimes contributes, but their four albums have written interesting twists into Red Red Meat's noisy Americana legacy.
Holy Broken comes five years after the band's third album, Fire Prizes, a record that sometimes sank under the weight of its own noisiness and strangely was a vinyl-only release in the U.S. Hurley and his primary partner in Sin Ropas, percussionist/multi-instrumentalist Danni Iosello, have come back from that break with their most direct and immediate album yet. That's not to say they've made a pop record-- this is still fuzzy indie rock that mixes noisier elements with acoustic folk instruments-- but they have left behind the long, slow, sludgy tracks of Fire Prizes for higher tempos, shorter songs, and brighter textures.
Outside of Hurley's overdriven guitar, one of the most prominent sounds on the album is the wordless two-part harmonies of Hurley and Iosello. Whether cutting through a grungy guitar buzzsaw or gently interacting with acoustic guitar, quiet organ, and wandering banjo, their harmonies are oddly consistent. Their sweetness also serves as a foil for Hurley's dusty croon on the lead vocals, which works well in the context of the band's sound, but nowhere better than on album opener "The Fever You Fake", a thick rocker built on a teetering fuzz riff that's spiked with candy-colored piano and the occasional counterintuitive solo.
One knock against the band is that their exceedingly basic vocal melodies tend to blur together, relying on the instrumental arrangements to differentiate them. That doesn't always work, but even on some of the slower, less dynamic songs that pad out the album, the band's sonic signature is strong. Holy Broken rests comfortably alongside Trick Boxes on the Pony Line among the best Sin Ropas releases and keeps a band that seemingly had faded away in the post-Red Red Meat conversation.