Thought Menagerie

Sixpence None the Richer's new album has been delayed.

This is a sentence that you could write at almost any point in the band's career after about 1995.

Thankfully, though, this is their first album that's been delayed in the era of social media and streaming music, so we've got two (three, if you count the already-released "My Dear Machine") new songs to tide us over: "Safety Line" and "Failure," which you can listen to on Sixpence's Facebook page here.

They're beautiful songs, of course (what, you think I'm not going to like them?), but what stood out to me immediately was the almost complete lack of electric guitar. I'm not saying everything's gotta be all guitars, all the time, but even as Sixpence has made their shift from melancholy Smiths-rock to brooding alt-rock to symphonic pop to something bordering on No Depression-style Americana, Slocum's electric has been front and center in all kinds of important ways. Even a piano-driven track like "The Lines of My Earth" is kicked into gear by a guitar solo, and while piano played a much more prominent role on Divine Discontent (a record with no guitar solos at all, if you don't count the much-missed "Too Far Gone"), most songs were driven by a complex, nimble riff.

The Sixpence of 2011 (or 2010, or even 2009 or 2008, really, if we want to think about when these songs actually had their genesis) is driven by three things, in this order: Leigh Nash's voice acoustic guitar, and Rhodes piano. The two new tracks are accented by a lovely pedal steel  -- but not by Matt Slocum's Fender twelve-string, nor by any other guitar of his we've come to know as the heart of the band's arrangements.

"Thought Menagerie," on the other hand, from the tail end of This Beautiful Mess, is Slocum, at his twinkliest -- three distinct riffs meander throughout the song -- the subtle intro/verse plucking, the slightly more energetic first chorus/bridge melody, which fights the vocal melody for attention and finally moves way up high on the tiny strings by the second half of the chorus.

Lyrically, this song is one of the last vestiges of Slocum's atmospheric stream-of-consciousness style (see "Musings" and "Falling Leaves") -- it even describes itself in the chorus: "all the thoughts that escape the cage/ can vamp across the spiritual plane." This is as neat-and-tidy a pop song as Sixpence wrote for this record, but the band manages to fit all sorts of wandering, musical and spiritual, into the form.