Upbeat indie with room for improvement

Melodies on Hiatus is the newest solo album from Albert Hammond Jr., guitarist for indie rock band The Strokes. Hammond keeps his style fairly consistent despite Melodies On Hiatus being written independently of his band members. Light indie rock riffs back nearly all of the album’s 19 tracks. As Hammond’s first solo release in five years, the album feels like an outpouring of ideas, years of collected melodies stretching the runtime double-length. Full of inspiration as it may be, however, the album’s execution leaves many of the songs remarkably similar to one another.

Melodies on Hiatus starts cooly upbeat, indie pop at its most archetypical. The songs are largely straightforward with a few vintage flairs, barbershop quartet harmonies into the choruses of “Old Man” and “I Got You” and low, new-wave vocals slurred under the stuttery opening riff of “Thoughtful Distress.” Hammond’s guitar serves a through-current, giving the album a sound as quintessentially indie rock as The Strokes themselves.

For all its merit as an indie rock album, however, Melodies On Hiatus is hesitant to push this definition; the songs have a kind of timidness, a rigid maintenance of style and form that leaves many of them feeling less distinctive. Unfortunately, the lyrics don’t seem to help much either. Hammond teamed up with Simon Wilcox, a songwriter mainly known for radio pop lyricism, on Melodies. While it’s hard to blame Hammond for channeling his creative energy into the parts of songwriting that he has a calling for, the album suffers slightly from this decision. At times the lyrics feel unimaginative, telling unadorned stories of breakups and get-togethers. After six or seven songs, the album begins to feel slightly generic, each song interchangeable with any that preceded it. 

The title Melodies on Hiatus speaks to an abandonment of cliched, hooky pop but listeners may be left wishing there was something to tether them within a sea of indie rock riffs, one song blending into the next. The album leaves its audience clinging to occasional baroque-pop keyboard flairs and exuberantly melodic guitar solos, but attempts at spicing up the music fall flat.

The second half of Melodies, luckily finds its way out of the woods. A mix of summery guitar and echoey dissonance in “Fast Kitten” builds a mood of contrasting nonchalance and distress, a feeling continued by the echoey instrumental breaks in “One Chance.” The cymbal-backed “818” features a melody that swoops and climbs sweetly through the song, mimicking the ups and downs of love that the lyrics describe. Even the more experimental a cappella tracks, like the loungey “Alright Tomorrow” and “I’d Never Leave” with its layered harmonies, don’t feel quite so out of place as they might have in the album’s first half.

Hammond’s vocals stand the test of Melodies’ less conventional songs with flying colors; while his voice sounds at first cookie-cutter indie, flat and filtered, the course of the album reveals Hammond’s ability to pull his voice down for a dark sulky effect in “Thoughtful Distress” and pull it up for joyful whoops here and there or layer it masterfully on top of itself in the backgrounds of choruses.

Melodies on Hiatus tends to feel like a keyed back, half-smiling version of The Strokes, a strong entry into the indie pop lexicon. Fans of Hammond and the genre won’t be disappointed by this album. They may, however, grow a little tired of it before its hour run time is up.