Quiet Loudly is a quartet out of Brooklyn with an equal affinity for artcore noise and southern soul-rock.  Not an immediately intuitive combination.  But the highs are high enough, and the lows forgivable enough, to produce a few keepers on their release, Soulgazer.  Whatever label you want to put on the band, you certainly can't call them boring.  Even their experimental misfires have a provocative sense of grandeur.  Quiet Loudly is one to keep an eye on.

If there is a no-brainer single on the album, it's probably "Over the Balcony".  The song renovates the standard ‘50s pop ballad, soups it up with distorted guitars, and adds a heartfelt crooning, wailing outro for good effect.  If the thorny art-lick leitmotif bookending the song were removed, "Over the Balcony" would be an absolute dream with a Girls (QRO album review)-like ambience that delivers the pop minus the sugar.  Alas, in the words of Poison, "Every rose has its thorn (yes, it does)."

Stylistically, though, "Over the Balcony" is a bit of an outlier.  Quiet Loudly's musical character is more prevalent on tracks like "Lift This Mountain" and "Church of Mud", both true southern soul-rock ballads with a prickly, trebly edge.  In "Lift This Mountain" a steady organ backs up a brash guitar that builds a platform, ever higher and higher, for the sweaty, sultry lead vocal to bare its soul.  At over eight minutes long, that can add up to a lot of soul-baring (let's hope the lead singer has enough soul to spare), but Quiet Loudly isn't afraid to stretch things out when they see a payoff on the horizon.  They're also not afraid to ‘throw in the kitchen sink’ if they want a song to go over big.  When the horn section kicks in on "You Never Call", you will feel as if you've been dropped into the Tower of Power-dimension.

Tracks like "We Look Alike" and "Good Hearts" remind you that Quiet Loudly is still developing.  In fact, the monolithic texture of the guitar throughout the album will make you think that "We Look Alike" refers to the songs themselves.  There's too much aimless guitar work in these mostly-instrumentals and the guitar is much too foregrounded.  Sometimes you have to strain to hear the drums, which should never happen on a rock album.  The good news is that most of these issues can be cleared up with a good sound engineer during production and don't really affect the band at all. 

Quiet Loudly was playing at the CMJ Music Festival this past year (QRO recap), which shows the band is aiming for bigger and better things.  They are not quite ready for their Arcade Fire (QRO live review) moment, but Soulgazer is a promising release that will definitely put Quiet Loudly on your radar.