Photo by Stacy Schwartz

Far too frequently in independent music circles, ambition is considered a dirty word—clearly the Alarmists aren’t hanging out in those circles. Every second of Ghost’s epic near-hour running time aims for transcendence, with each of the fourteen tracks arranged to the hilt. Lovold’s tuneful and mildly raspy voice is multi-tracked to the heavens nearly throughout, and stack upon stack of keyboard figures and ambient sounds round out the mix with urgent guitar solos intermittently splattered on top. The same musical game of spot-the-influences that came in handy when examining their debut EP A Detail of Soldiers can be played—late period Beatles, Spoon’s less sinister moments, Wilco circa Summerteeth—but the Alarmists are clearly intent on making their own distinct impression. How intent? Lovold bought a house and then spent five months alongside his band mates building a studio for them to record in so they could take all the time necessary to refine their sound in the studio.

“The home studio is both a luxury and a curse,” admits Lovold. “You have to be really careful about it. I could still be sitting down there tweaking and rehearsing right now. It’s the first time we were able to produce a record so we wanted to put a lot of fun stuff in there to listen to and discover. Certainly there’s an element of absurdity to some of the things we did, putting the flanger on the vocals and panning it all the way left and that sort of thing.”

Clearly enamored with their freedom in the studio, Ghost arguably tries a little too hard in its quest for sonic grandeur. By throwing so many sounds into the mix and opting for a dramatically full sound throughout, the proceedings at times feel overstuffed, making me long for the sparer pleasures of their debut EP’s local hit “Some Things Never Stop,” a song that rode Lovold’s compelling voice, a sly electric piano figure, and little else into instant classic territory in my music collection. The listener can only take so many dramatic choral flourishes before they begin to blur into one another.

This is a minor complaint, however, as each song taken individually stands up to repeated listens and clearly bears the mark of attentive craftsmen. The album’s high notes, of which there are many, show that The Alarmists are quite capable of fulfilling their grand ambitions. The menacing grind of “Light a Smoke” finds the group moving in a darker Interpol-tinged direction without losing their pop sensibility, while the sweeping chorus of mid-tempo ballad “Hired Gun” shows their ability to deliver arena-sized emotional catharsis when so inclined. And throughout the band flexes its brooding Brit pop muscle to fine effect—the minor key macabre of “Try to Be Kind” would have fit in nicely on Pulp’s This is Hardcore.

Although an independent band in every sense of the word—Lovold laments the "accounting" work as the worst of his non-stop band-related duties—The Alarmists don’t make what people tend to think of as “indie rock.” Raised in the suburbs, Lovold has no qualms about citing Pink Floyd as musical heroes—certainly far from your typical indie touchstone. This places The Alarmists in a tricky position on the national indie music scene. They make accessible, immaculately crafted pop with a classic bent and a strong enough pull in its own right that they’ve already thrived locally, but on a national independent music scene that still tends to overvalue the self-consciously "different," it’s hard to suss out where exactly The Alarmists fit.

Lovold’s too busy working to waste time worrying about it. “I don’t care that we’re not particularly trendy,” he says. “There are a lot of people over the age of 45 that come out to our shows and love us and that’s really exciting and cool to me. The ultimate goal is to be a successful band actually able to make a living off of music. We’re not to that point yet; we’re basically breaking even right now. There are a lot of elements of chance in terms of realizing our goals, but you can still give it a shot. I’m certainly not going to be 30 years old and asking, ‘Is my band going to make it?’ I’m going to go after this aggressively for five more years and if it turns out that we don’t make it, that’s OK. I’ll go back to having a normal life and just go into my basement and make music for fun. That being said, if our full time job was to go to another city and play that would be great."

"Making music is such a weird and intangible thing to try and do for a living," offers a reflective Lovold as our conversation winds down. "There are doctors and lawyers out there in the world who really help people and it’s like, what the hell am I doing with my life that makes any difference? At the end of the day, though, people need music and we’re not saving lives, but we hopefully make some parts of peoples lives more enjoyable and that’s its own exciting feeling. It’s insane when I look back and realize that I’ve spent the last six years of my life pursuing music nonstop. It’s completely irrational and seems like a waste of time and money. But what am I going to do? Not make music because there’s no money in it? It’s what I love to do.”

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The Alarmists covering Abbey Road for England Swings VI  (live at the Triple Rock 05/11/2007)
The Alarmists - 89.3 The Current In-Studio (7/16/07)

COMING UP: The Alarmists CD Release Show for The Ghost and The Hired Gun with The Debut, Jelloslave, and White Light Riot. Friday, July 20. First Avenue . 8pm. 18+. $8/$10.