I love the beginning bit of "It Never Happened" (up to the 2:12 mark) before it becomes an instrumental. "Fashion Coat" could make a comeback seeing how everyone's into Steely Dan again. I wouldn't be mad if "Lucky You" got back into the setlist. I'm surprised their career survived Sad Songs. It feels overly influenced by the early 00s New York scene and is probably one of the weaker albums by a lot of their contemporaries.

However their s/t debut is actually pretty darn good. It's weirdly rootsy which is different from all their other records (all that later Grateful Dead worship made sense though) but the songs are solidly melodic. The production sounds more functional than lavish. The whole vibe is a bunch of young guys trying on a borrowed attitude. Which is kind of everything debut albums are supposed to do, show a little competence, show a little room to grow, invite people to the party.

Since we're all just strangers on the internet I'm going to engage in some wild speculation: Alligator is their second attempt at making Sad Songs. A lot of the formulas and experiments (keyboards, skronky guitars, mid-tempo ballads, multi-part songs with elaborate arrangements) from Sad Songs show up in Alligator. And they ditched the slide guitars and country-ish leanings. It's like someone sat them down and said "you can be from Ohio all you want but you're in Brooklyn now and if you're trying to pay rent in Williamsburg you have to make people believe you're very urbane because we're all moving here to pretend we're not from small towns."