Confetti Reprise is an EP of unreleased tracks from the sessions that created Chicago-based A Lull’s 2011 release Confetti. When I got this in my email, I didn’t understand either half of this equation, so I backtracked and started with the Confetti record. I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about this record because there’s way too much going on in it.

There are traces of pretty much every indie subgenre in the past few years save witch house and chillwave. Confetti, in addition, has some of the nouveau R&B sound (read: The Weeknd, The Sa-Ra Creative Partners), the electronic flourishes that every band is digging into now, and a bit of an old-school industrial feeling, which can be attributed to their location in Chicago or the house movement that surrounds them there. While there are a lot of sounds mixing together here, they all seem to work together very well. Confetti is an album that shows a lot of promise. It gets a little slow and ponderous at moments as well as overly assaulting in others, but the overall product is engaging and creative. It’s a CD that is well-organized. Unfortunately for the band, the four tracks that make up Confetti Reprise would not make it on to the album because Confetti would then be a completely overblown, bloated affair by means of sheer runtime (over an hour total) and auditory demands (so many sound layers). The tracks that are on Confetti all work together and serve to make a good album if not an amazing one.

My job as a critic here is not only to see if the tracks that make up Confetti Reprise could have fit on Confetti, but to see if they stand up enough on their own. Given the nice polish of their record, the tracks of the reprise are rough. They seem like ideas that have some hints of promise, but needed to be furthered refined with an eye towards release. I say that they need to be cleaned up because they just don’t seem to fit in with the vibe of the original record. The elements are still there like the cacophony of rhythm and the excellent singing of Nigel Dennis, but the tracks on Confetti Reprise sound unnecessarily dark and ominous. Even on the darker tracks of Confetti, there is still the semblance of some hope buried under all of the drum layers. The EP just sounds like continual brutality, and it doesn’t go with the vibe on the album. So, the EP tracks don’t really fit with Confetti very well.

Do the tracks stand on their own? Not really. There is something viscerally audacious about an indie rock band releasing an EP of unused tracks after releasing their first album. And, no I didn’t misspeak when I said viscerally. It’s like they are slapping me in the face with the fact that they can make a lot of music. Unfortunately, I end up with the last laugh because this EP, this celebration of excess creativity, was a little preemptive. This EP doesn’t really need to exist. The tracks would be fine for a re-issue of Confetti like Mission of Burma did with Vs. upon its re-release, adding recording session outtakes OK/NO WAY and Forget to it. Unlike Vs., these extra songs aren’t really that awesome or memorable. They sound, unsurprisingly, like tracks the band rightly left off the album. I can’t figure out why they’ve released this less than half-a-year after the debut LP. Maybe I’m getting old in this post 9/11 world, but I just don’t get it.

Inevitably, they are free to do whatever they want as musicians, but if you are trying to tighten your music belt, you can certainly spend money on a far more worthy endeavor than Confetti Reprise. You should maybe spend it to check out Confetti.