Decibully Goes Out With A Ho-Hum

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There was a time when Decibully was Milwaukee’s brightest star, the city’s great hipster hope, but instead of obtaining national relevance, the band mired in an oft-ignored scene.  The band is survived by a hand-full of sometimes-maudlin, sometimes-brilliant albums, various side projects, the Listening Party Record Label, and a Wikipedia page that still reads in the present tense .

So Decibully was a band from Milwaukee, who’ve just released their self-titled and final LP.  You can download the album for however much or little money you’d like to pay for it over at the Listening Party Store.   For the most part, Decibully treads the dreamy line that the band has always trod, but seeing that this is a final effort, the tracks are sappier than usual.  Decibully’s signature blend of faux-folk and psychedelia seeps through the ten creepy tracks, but there are no overdubs on this album, so the result is grittier and more naked than what we’re used to.

The fact that the unitalicized Decibully recorded Decibully in a week is impressive, because the album is well-produced and crafted, but as a whole, the effort falls flat.  It’s nice to reminisce about a band that gave a decade of loyal service to a city that didn’t always deserve it, but Decibully doesn’t live up to the band’s own legacy.  There are moments on, “I Want,” and “Blood We Bleed,” when it pains a Milwaukeean to realize that these concepts will never be fully explored, and that this musical direction will never actually be traveled by those who built the road, but then “God’s Smile” is cued up and we are reminded of the hokey lyricism that sometimes sours a great track.

Ultimately, that doesn’t really matter because Decibully is the band that gave a lot of us reason to be hopelessly romantic about the Milwaukee music scene.  Without that, a lot of we shitty bloggers wouldn’t be here shit-talking right now, and nobody would be reading our tributes run afoul.

Mp3: Decibully – I Want