Falling Off The Sky

Falling Off The Sky, the fifth dB's album overall, third with Chris Stamey, and first in 25 years, arrives with a lot to live up to. The Hoboken-via-Winston-Salem quartet's first two albums are New Wave power pop classics featuring singer/songwriters Stamey and Peter Holsapple in top form, but Stamey left the band he founded after 1982's Repercussion. A Stamey-less dB's cut two worthy albums after that, but hung it up by '88. Stamey and Holsapple made a couple of duo records over the years, but this is the first original-lineup dB's album in three decades. It would be disingenuous to say the time gap is inaudible here: there's a maturity apparent on these songs that would be both impossible and foolish to obscure. The dB's have pulled off the tricky task of growing up without growing old; their sonic fingerprints remain unchanged, and this is instantly identifiable as a dB's album, slathered with superior, popwise songcraft. But while cuts like the garage-rock opener "That Time Is Gone" feel even more fervent than the band's early-‘80s material, it's unlikely that the dB's of 30 years ago -- even allowing for historical logistics -- could have turned out a tune like the affecting "She Don't Drive in the Rain Anymore," written by former New Orleans resident Holsapple about his wife's Katrina experience.