Antarctica Takes It! - The Penguin League
Dylan McKeever and the band he’s put together grew up in the year long summers of Oakland, near San Francisco. Maybe that’s why the penguin on their album cover staring at the man wrapped up warm looks fake.
But wait. In the album’s booklet, someone called Sam Silverstein writes ‘The photograph on the front… shows Charley playing hide and seek with an Adelie penguin at Cape Royds (Ernest Shackleton’s base) in Antarctica in Januaua, 1967’.
So the only fakes in the picture are the big speech bubble of the penguin saying ‘Antarctica Takes It!’ to Mr. Silverstein and ‘The Penguin League’ written at the bottom in the same circular childish hand.
This album doesn’t explain what Adelie penguins are or why they look like they were designed by Jim Henson, which, in the same situation, is the first thing most people would do. ‘Antarctica Takes It!’ have as wide a vocabulary as the best pop bands. This begins with ‘I’m No Lover’ where a brass section gives it a feel of young adult easy listening and ends with ‘Goodbye’ where the lyrics are like a teenage suicide note. These two are less than two minutes each.
Their longest song, 4 minutes and nineteen seconds long, is ‘Antarctica’. McKeever sings what notes he can, which isn’t too many, and always gives the impression he is trying for higher. ‘Antarcticcaaaaa/You stole our hearts’. It’s second to last before ‘Goodbye’ which, after a thirty second pause and with just piano and vocals, is more like a hidden track than an ending. ‘Antarctica’ sounds like all the previous songs combined. The instruments being played • violins, guitars, piano, drums, - outnumber the band. They must have had to do dozens of takes, playing down the one microphone they claim to own, to get it on record.
It was worth it. The tinny sound and less than muscular singing become part of the charm of a song that is miraculous. Four Californians crammed round a microphone in the singer’s bedroom pretending to be Shackleton’s crew and, for all the listener will notice, pulling it off. With all its layers, the song is the closest the band come to sounding like their nearest relative who enjoys major success, Sufjan Stevens. Their edges are a lot rougher. Their eccentricity is a bit less convincing. But, whatever concessions you attach to that comparison, it’s still a massive, massive compliment.