Breathe

Don’t call Baghdad Scuba Review a “hippie jam band.” Firstly, because it says not to right on the band’s website; but mostly because for all the loose song structure smattered with trippy breakdowns and noodling guitar solos, the band’s sophomore album, Breathe, is too thought-out to be considered just a jam. The sextet labored for more than a year in the studio to condense an ambling live concert experience into a somewhat wieldy record, whittling it down to 13 tracks with many clocking in around four minutes (a little short for proper jamming).

The songs with the tightest running times display BSR in the best light, like album opener “Being,” a relatively svelte blues-funk moon rock speckled with moog highlights and astral harmonies. “Dormant,” moves along nicely with a bouncy piano line and “We Didn’t Start The Fire” levels of verbosity packed into the verses. But when the songs start to close in on the six-minute mark and beyond, as with feel-good choogler “Red Sky,” a slight sense of exhaustion sets in. An extended recap of what was surely a pretty fun fishing and camping trip to Canada, complete with zany spoken outbursts about netting the big one and an out-of-place hand drum, didgeridoo, and tribal grunt interlude, “Sky” is pleasant but a bit to bulky to hold interest. But forehead-slapping lyrics like, “The water’s cold, no one’s bathed in a week / This is no place for our women, I’m sure they’d freak,” are easily forgiven since the fun sounds so genuine.

So even though the songs walk and talk like jam-rock (and the album cover looks ready to send off for tie dye shirt printing), most of BSR’s work shows the kind of restraint not normally reserved for Grateful Dead disciples. And in smaller doses, jamming can be a pretty good time.