Peace's The World Is Too Much With Us has a trance-like quality

The World Is Too Much With Us (Suicide Squeeze)

The singing is bound to be the make-or-break factor here. Just as you’ll never get into Magnetic Fields if you can’t get past Stephin Merritt’s voice and you’re never going to love the Fall if you don’t first fall for Mark E. Smith’s vocals, you won’t be able to fully embrace Peace without loving the man at the microphone. In fact, Merritt and Smith are good reference points for what Dan Geddes does, which is to alternate between monotone sprechgesang and more tuneful baritone crooning.

It’s the latter that he employs on “Your Hand in Mine”, which kicks off Peace’s sophomore LP with a shot of swoony romance driven by jangly guitars and an arrangement that sounds impressively full without being cluttered. “Your Hand in Mine” might be the best song on The World Is Too Much With Us, but it’s certainly not the only one worth hearing. “Black Cocaine” is a postpunker that surges with martial drum rolls and wah-wah–fuelled guitar freakouts, while album-closer “Tattoo” starts with chiming six-strings and slowly builds with a hypnotic kind of tribal energy.

If Peace has a failing, it’s a tendency toward repetition, which pushes several tracks over the six-minute mark. The band could tighten things up with some judicious editing in the songwriting department. Then again, that might rob the material of some of its trance-inducing qualities—and writing long songs never hurt the Fall, did it?