Greeley Estates

The third album is the one fans generally have to worry about. It's usually the one in which a band has exhausted its supply of genuinely inspired musical ideas and now has to come up with brilliance on the fly. It has to point to some fearless new direction, one that risks alienating half the fan base while potentially letting a new group of transients in. And it's usually the album on which somebody suggests, "What about horns? Or a children's chorus?" Thankfully, none of that plays into hometown screamo heroes Greeley Estates' junior album, Go West Young Man, Let the Evil Go East. As singer Ryan Zimmerman would tell you if you worked up the pluck to ask him and risk getting that black grease he and the band smear themselves with these days all over you, Go West is neither a retrenchment of Greeley's past onslaughts nor a radical change in direction, but simply a solid, darker consolidation of where the band was last time out. Title-wise, the first single, "Blue Morning," sounds like some kinda Jack Johnson snoozefest, but don't worry, it's Zimmerman delivering the sad news ("I'm not a monster, I'm just a sick man/Who would give anything to have his soul back"), the bad news ("You should probably just shoot me in the head now"), and the mad news ("Otherwise, I'm gonna kill you") all in one violent mood swing. And "Desperate Times Call for Desperate Housewives" keeps with the Greeley songs tradition of citing television programs none of their fans would ever watch — like "Too Much CSI" or the not-inspired-by-Murder She Wrote anthem "Angela Lansbury Keeps Guys Like You off the Street" (order that ringtone and find out it was inspired by The Manchurian Candidate at your own peril!).
Sat., Nov. 1, 6 p.m., 2008