Download frontman sings of river crossings, trudging through forests, shouting out his love from the mountaintops, all these big, romantic, pre-cell-phone notion of fidelity, honor, the lay of the land. After a couple of well-received EPs-- including 2010's fine Mighty-- the Michigan-to-L.A. transplant's debut LP, Lonesome Dreams, finds Schneider digging his mud-caked heels into his music's more rustic side, shedding much of the electronic flourishes and international flavors of his early EPs and going to town on harmony-rich folk-rock. But by throwing the focus onto the latter half of his Urban Cowboy routine, Schneider's vision has narrowed, his once-vibrant, open-armed Americana now overcautious, content to shoot squarely for the middle.
Mighty found Schneider couching his amber-tinted, My Morning Jacket-indebted wallops with clattering rhythms and meandering arrangements, lending the music both a dynamism and a dreamlike quality well-suited to his chronologically unfixed lyrics. Sonically, Lonesome Dreams is crisper, less woozy, likely a product of Schneider's time with Lord Huron's five-piece traveling ensemble. He's still drawing deep from the well of what's come to represent "American music" in 2012: mostly acoustic instruments, pile'o'choirboys harmonies, lyrics about long distances and time-spanning loves, that sort of thing. But, where Mighty saw Schneider playing with the edges of the form, Lonesome Dreams sticks with the tried-and-true. All this makes for a mean case of deja vu. Not only is Schneider's wanderer's spirit harder and harder to locate amidst the 100-part vocals and galloping melodies, he seems to be retreating into his influences here, with Lonesome Dreams traveling the same dusty trails as the current princes of the provincial, Fleet Foxes.
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