Catchy, danceable, obviously very effective production, but the lyrics don't bear any attention. The fantasies are too insipid to be thought about, and that's a hard constraint to have put on my listening. If a song is playing there's always the risk that I might think about it! But in the right mood at the right time, there's a jingly pop children's-book cheer to these that I'm not immune to.
Very good writing, playing, and singing; very good late night wistful dreaming. There’s some gray overlap between soft beautiful interiority and unhealthy dangerous loneliness, and I relate (uneasily) to the eerie line-straddling this doomed young guy was doing. I’ll probably return to this some day and get to know it better.
Now you’re talking. This I can use. Every note means something and every note means nothing. How much thinking is it possible to do without thinking? This much. It’s all vibe, but vibe can encompass as much as you let it.
I don’t want to hear people complaining about Maxwell’s Silver Hammer or Octopus’s Garden; the greatness of the Beatles is the headspace the songs map out in combination, and unrepentant childishness is essential to the blend. That’s main thing is that this album is not about selling persona or cool or a mood to meet the market. It’s just the celebration of music-making as a practice. The implicit text of music is always something something about love, mixed with all the other jumble in your head, and in some inarticulate way is about everything in your life, including the nonsense. Oh that magic feeling. Yup, they nailed it. Amen.
These guys rock almost as hard as The Beatles! The music isn’t interesting enough to excuse the lyrics and vice versa. (They’re right in the Spinal Tap strike zone, though that isn’t their fault.) But if you zone out, it’s a perfectly comfy used rock ‘n roll sofa. It’s obviously secondhand and stained, but in the basement rec room, who cares?
There was a time when I would have considered this hopelessly obnoxious NYC status smarm. “Can you handle the noise? Can you handle the art?Can you handle the cool?” (Yeah, dudes, I can handle it; now shut up.) But I’m more mature now and I can hear that within the bounds of the underground hipster ego fantasy, they mean what they’re saying and they’re interested in what they’re doing. They’re actually pretty good at it. And who am I to begrudge anyone their stupid ego fantasies. We’ve all got them. So here’s your three stars.
It goes without saying that I will never ever put this on.
I worry that too much retro culture is bad for the soul of the present day, but I also worry that the pop timeline went somehow awry in the 90s… so the rise in the 2010s of heartfelt, inventive 80s retro pop as a major indie subgenre seems to me mostly a good thing. The tunes and production on this album are obvious hipsterized 80s pastiche (with heavy Michael Jackson influence) but they’re also just really good. Unfortunately, the lyrics and the artistic outlook (and the scansion, my god) are hopelessly euro-weirdo, which to me feels like a waste of the excellent production. It all threatens to be pretty irritating… but I found it easy enough to ignore the words and imagine my own meanings, so I’m still giving it four stars. The sounds just worked for me.
Of course this isn’t for me and I don’t need it. Speaking as a clueless tourist here, it seems to me pretty good in its class. They rock, sure. Any one track is kind of fun make-believe. So three stars, why not. But for me a whole album in this register is untenable. Even two songs in a row. If you’re metal for hours at a time, you should probably seek medical attention.
I didn't hear a single lyric. I have no idea what they were singing about. Just mood. And yeah, it's just a monotonous weepy-wistful cosmic pop trance-out in a very narrow range of pastels. But spending 49 minutes in that territory can serve me, and they seem like authentic explorers of the feeling-space.
I listened to one of their later albums a few years back and I remember it being a little more interesting than this. But not by much. And "interest" really isn't the point.
It starts off rowdy and obnoxious in a way that I really have no use for, but the album eases up and gets more thoughtful as it goes along, and in the back half I started to feel myself getting on board. Yeah, okay, they’re pretty good. But ultimately this is still by and for a mindset that I’ve never shared and that holds no mystique for me, so, you know, three stars.
I’m a sucker for the cinematic formal sense of a concept album / rock opera, and musically this really is well put together. Varied, compelling, intriguing, satisfying. Five star stuff. But take back a star for what’s actually going on in the story and the lyrics: outlandishly grandiose dimwitted self-involvement. Ugh. I wish I hadn’t looked it up.
Nicely moody 1971 wistful drift. A little stoned and repetitive but I do go there sometimes. Not a bad place to go.
Being a sophisticate is the same thing as being a kid banging random notes. I definitely like that. Nothing to prove. “Cool” as “get real,” intellect disgusted with refinement. To me this is classic housework music. Getting your hands dirty, being messy, is part of showing off and feeling on top of things.
