onsafos has some street cred, that’s for sure. The band sports members of Bright Eyes and The Good Life as well as the son of former Crazy Horse bassist Bill Talbot. The band makes Tilting At Windmills an ambitious journey into a swirling morass of rock, folk, and elements of country. It’s a ten-song glance into a broken backed world of disappointment, bad decisions, and misplaced lives. It’s a musically ambitious record that could easily get weighed down by its genre jumping tendencies, but it’s to the credit of the musicians that Tilting At Windmills is able to be more than just an interesting effort. Instead it’s a fairly coherent whole with strong moments of hope nestled amidst its despondent cast of characters.

Intentionally or not, the focal point of the songs on Tilting At Windmills is Stephanie Drootin’s voice. She has a high-pitched reedy voice that doesn’t stretch into the corners of these dark hued songs as much as shimmer above them like an unreliable narrator. Drootin is a veteran of such upper echelon indie rock bands as Bright Eyes, Azure Ray, and The Good Life, but this is the first album where her voice takes center stage for the duration. Unfortunately Drootin’s voice is too thin to carry the sea of bad decisions that marks much of Tilting At Windmills. Instead of elevating the songs past their sad sack circumstances towards an emotionally resonant place the listener feels invested in, often we’re left wondering how good these songs could be. In order for a band to pull off songs that are as downtrodden as these the listener needs a rudder to hold on to, a steadying presence. Drootin’s voice is simply not expressive enough to fill up the empty spaces in these songs.

Album opener “On And On” is a tale of unhinged living. The song starts as a maudlin waltz, a mandolin accented moment of regret that finds Drootin’s confused character moving “through the town” before the sun is up. She’s clearly searching for something, but it’s unclear if even she knows what that may be. Consafos does a good job of musically mimicking the characters state of mind. The song moves through three distinct phases, changing tempo, style, and tone. After the waltz-like opening the track does a quick U-turn into a castanet flavored jig before doing a quick hop on a drum roll that opens the door for a trumpet solo that runs the song out. It’s a complex structure that eschews any sort of comfortable verse chorus verse underpinnings. It’s music more as a vehicle for storytelling than foot tapping or singing-a-long.

Many of the songs have “On And On”’s schizophrenic styling, a single one often holding two or three distinct movements. The root of this may be the limitations of Drootin’s voice. These shifting songs within a song are always rooted in a country/folk tradition but mutates when a piano line or violin suddenly takes over a guitar’s responsibilities, or a tempo change signals a shift in mood that Drootin’s voice may not be able to express.

“Seneca” is a story of an oil town gone dry. The train has stopped coming to Seneca and the life has seeped out of it. There are merely forgotten people left lamenting better times: a preacher with no congregation, a teacher with no pupils. The star of the song is Billy Talbot’s deeply weepy guitar which threads its way throughout the song like a wandering animal, sometimes howling, sometimes whimpering. Drootin’s voice’s lack of power keeps it from being a truly relevant part of the song, leaving it to Talbot’s guitar work to emote.

Tilting At Windmills has many deft moments. Consafos is clearly a band determined to be much more than a side project and that shows in the songwriting and production. It’s unfair to pin the album’s slow points and less successful moments entirely on Drootin’s voice, but there are times on Tilting At Windmills when the music seems to want her to give more to the songs. Perhaps on their next outing Consafos will figure out how to make those moments less reliant on her voice.