Twin Shadow: Confess (2012)

(4AD)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Two years ago, I wrote this about Twin Shadow's debut album Forget:

Twin Shadow has the potential to be a giant if he just lets himself go a little bit. He has a powerful, sensual voice with ample emotional capability. I firmly believe he has some brilliant music in him and that we'll be hearing a lot about him in the next few years. And I'm willing to bet that'll be because he lets go of some of his attachment to the admittedly wonderful music he and I both listened to and loved growing up and strips this material down to its core.

I wasn't quite right. It's true that George Lewis, Jr. has now recorded one of the few great albums of 2012. But he does this not by stripping away his pop aspirations to find the wispy core underneath, but by amping up his mastery of hooks and taking on the swagger and confidence of a true star. It helps that he's shed the indie-rock pretensions and handled production himself, thus delivering on the vague promise of "Shooting Holes at the Moon" by bolting forth with something of universal and nearly automatic appeal. On the cover, which looks like something Belmondo would have stared longingly at in Breathless, he sneers at us from black leather and a garish blue backdrop; that photo somehow tells the same story as the record itself. Inspired by a new awareness of mortality, he's made a series of ten or eleven songs -- all of them brilliant and single-worthy, if we still lived in that time -- that provoke the heart, gut and loins with complex layers of accusation, the romantic pain of stale relations, the pining for redemption. And underneath it all is what? Is it soul music? Pop? Synth wankery? All of the above, conjuring up a time when there was little point to such stylistic separations and doing so with immediacy and irreverence. What can you say about its charged and emotional road-movie relationship chronicle semi-narratives set to popcraft of the highest order? Except: they're genuinely breathtaking.

Lewis puts on a cocky dreamcoat that's frequently resisted nowadays, like some highly introspective version of not Morris Day but Morris Day's licentious character in Purple Rain. "I don't give a damn about your dreams," he announces on "You Call Me On," and his dismissive eyerolls cast toward the women in his life are only a few steps removed from George Harrison's abusive-husband rant "You Like Me Too Much." Yet Lewis' brash ways mask an obvious, abstract artfulness, and the lyricism of these bad feelings is somehow enchanting in its complexity and lack of specifics -- a conversation joined midstream -- giving his lyrics an open-ended and mysterious edge that comes indisputably from a murky place, documenting forbidden thoughts with the relentless force of a documentarian. It helps, of course, that the music is uncommonly sexy, full of desire and bitingly delivered illicit intent.

"Golden Light" opens with a lonely echo, the sound of an empty tall-ceilinged mall or church, but that's the only point except the gaps between songs in which one isn't meant to be throttled back. That first cut is an dead ringer for Arcade Fire until you notice how much more Lewis' voice stretches and bends than Win Butler's. Tightly controlled and confident throughout, the singing voice that was already haunting on Forget achieves transcendence now. It's also impressively elastic without ever losing its specific character -- his croon can evoke Morrissey on "The One," Roland Gift on "Five Seconds," a pained and expressive Marvin Gaye on "When the Movie's Over." His self-production makes a world of difference; after sounding almost disembodied and completely separate from the music on the previous record, only on the hidden track "Mirror in the Dark" here does he emphasize such sonic messiness, and here to emphasize the alienation that sits like a specter at the end of the LP ("I've tried pleasure, I've tried pain"). Otherwise, he's the swooning balladeer and the steely-eyed dream operator.

Free of ironic trappings, Lewis marries his songs to an affected urgency familiar to anyone who listened to FM radio in the 1980s or has heard many soundtracks from the period -- but unlike so many of his peers, he appropriates only what he needs from this. This is no straight-ahead nostalgia trip, it's a recasting of old sounds in a refreshed and original context. It's backward-looking, in other words, without wallowing -- the abstract guitar bliss early on "You Call Me On" is just the bedrock of a gradually transformative track, and the night driving L.A. shit on "Five Seconds" doesn't strive for any touchstone in its tricky stop-start format and chilly "I'm not trying to make you cry" sentiment. But try not to feel like you're clubbing in some distant, freeflowing moment when that thing pares it down starkly to drums and vocals then builds back up. It's not just a throwback, it riddles something in us.

And okay, influences do abound. I even hear a little Midnight Oil on the nocturnal-to-sunrise "Run My Heart," and it would take a less fervent fanboy than me not to reach for the Depeche Mode comparisons on the gigantic tower of pounding snare programs in "Patient," which lays down its cards in a killer-powerful horn-filled chorus. And those Human League and/or Eurythmics synth trills straight from 1984 on the scarily hook-filled "When the Movie's Over" are confidently spun into now by vocals, sludge and melody, a good microcosm for the way the record works so instinctively and brilliantly.

Given all this, it seems a tad ironic that the centerpiece of Confess should be the song that sounds most like it could've come out of earlier Twin Shadow sessions. "I Don't Care" controls its demonic aural urges just long enough demonstrate how his songwriting has advanced since 2010 -- it's a brutal ballad about sexual pasts and mutual destruction, swirling around an alarming bridge with "Lookin' to get it 'cause your daddy's not home, so I came to you in the night" belted out like Lewis is losing his grip but gracefully, but reliant equally upon the burn-through-the-bullshit refrain about being danced "around the room while you lie to me." It's a long courtroom exchange of, yeah, confessions and finger-pointing but rendered as though it's the last of the romantic battles to be conquered. It feels like such a climactic and weighty revelation that the nearly perfect "Be Mine Tonight" can only serve here as its coda: a murky intonation from deep within that suddenly lurches into action halfway through. But its emotions are far less ambiguous, a mildly menacing lover's ballad and come-on about where to go if you can't go home, and the fact we notice that on first pass is a credit to how much of a master Lewis already is at communicating both musically and lyrically, and the extent to which we're completely his guests in this domain. Already.

For me, this assured cycle of addiction, loss, and decadence (pure horrorshow sleaze on "Beg for the Night," by the way) cuts to shreds something like M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming because it shows no human detachment from its pure showmanship. Every ounce of Lewis is in every second of this record; you can periodically hear the desperation thus warranted in his sultry voice... but only when he wants you to. It's really the kind of pop music you dream about; for all its archaic fixations on Vince Clarke synths and Minneapolis R&B gurgling, it lives so much in our moment and delivers such a sense of strength and fearlessness that, yeah, if you love music, any kind of pop music, you should probably hear it. Slide into these biting odes to dishonesty and regret, every one of which sounds more than a little like a future classic, and find out what all those disparate noises really amount to: "a sanctuary for your troubles and doubts."

[SEE ALSO:]
Forget (2010)

Words and Music by Saint Etienne (2012)

(Heavenly)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED [re-graded A+ in 2019]

Words and Music bites off a lot more than most latter-day albums by major pop groups -- it intends to be a catch-all "this is your story" for obsessive music people, especially Anglophiles, the world over, all rendered with a spirit of personal and direct communication. To put it bluntly, it's about life; looking backward, looking forward, celebrating hedonism, looking for more, remembering dancing and making out and distant hazy things, and wondering how the years got away, how to regain the urgency. Its sentimentality for its own form, for the utility of dance music and rock & roll, is unabashed, but it knows its audience. There's a broad contingent of people who won't know quite what Sarah Cracknell's on about when she broods about holing up in her bedroom reading Smash Hits and memorizing the charts, biding her time and waiting for a freedom that she may or may not know what to do with. For those who do know, who know this obsession and passion exactly, hers may be the all-time definitive statement about it. Hence, this record is like the sonic Best Years of Our Lives; once you've spent time with it, so much as thinking about it can make you misty-eyed.

The sweet-natured, deeply moving spoken-word piece about budding as both an adult and a genuine fervent advocate of scenes, labels, bands, songs is "Over the Border," which opens this unspeakably beautiful album. It hits close to home because of its simultaneous attachment to the local and to the universal, something literal here (though there is, of course, a street map of imaginary pop-related place names on the cover) that translates to an embodiment of the band and Cracknell's own experience to incorporate the bare fact of coming of age as as certain sort of person. With its references to Factory Records, to Genesis, to lying in and listening to the radio like there's nothing else in the world, it immediately gives the rest of the material a lot to live up to, and the defining moment of Words and Music is likely what happens when this remarkable piece bleeds into the triumphant, explosive "I've Got Your Music," an open-hearted confection whose pound is of the heartbeat.

Listening to a backward-looking synth and beat-heavy creation like this, you can find yourself getting caught up in the past loves it evokes; Pet Shop Boys are everywhere (the florid string-heavy arrangements keep threatening to segue into "It's Alright") and the streets of early-'80s postpunk London seem to pulsate from the speakers. But if Saint Etienne have a message here, even if this is a sort of psychological regrouping and retrospective, it's to appreciate the moment, the everchanging now. Few albums can so easily make you feel as if you haven't done enough with your life, your youth... inflicting an appreciation and/or lament of the progression of years, the daytime relations and nighttime escapes as they accumulate -- seconds and minutes passing by faster than you can grab and savor them. And maybe you can't. Perversely, something like "Last Days of Disco" finds an affection for hardbound pop history in complement to its demand for a nostalgia-free, totally loose and free oblivion, the pure joy of new adulthood tinged with intimacy and propulsion: "Let's dance," goes the towering chorus, "got our act together." It's as suggestive as a novel -- you can see the flashing lights, smell the alcohol, feel the coldness and give of the floor as you shuffle and skip your way across the room.

Saint Etienne's timing for this couldn't really be better; as records by the likes of Pink and Ellie Goulding and even Usher ("Scream") suggest, the sound of Eurodisco and New Romantic is now a modern-day fixation that has lost many of its throwback associations. "Popular" sounds uncannily like something thoroughly modern and energetic that could be on your top 40 station now, and quite effortlessly so, but of course this veteran trio who've rendered dance music a romantic goldmine for more than two decades bring wisdom and the coloration of hard-won artistic progression to their music -- which it makes it more interesting still, and more moving, that they firmly place themselves in solidarity with a defiantly youthful and unfussily populist sound. The music is meant to be everyone's.

Another layer of this, of course, is a wistful glance backward at youth -- and much of this music aches with nostalgia and regret. The build of melody, sweetness, and beat on the remarkably detailed "Heading for the Fair" is steady and consistent enough to hide some of its melancholy, but the acknowledgement of mortality on "Twenty Five Years" is something altogether more sobering, and the relationship funeral "I Threw It All Away" is a stark reminder of the impossibility of going back. On these songs, Cracknell strongly evokes her peer Tracey Thorn in her witty and urbane treatment of depression and regret, infused with the most delicate kind of personal detail. "I Threw It All Away" in particular is almost a difficult listen, for it so straightforwardly confronts the fears that are kept at bay for most of the album, the carefree youth slipping away forever. You will never be the comfortable kid in the back seat again, the sulking teenager in the bedroom; it's on you now. That will never not be terrifying.

It would be easy for an aging band to look down upon their descendants and the revolving, some would say elastic, nature of bigtime pop careerdom, but they don't. Cracknell, Peter Wiggs and Bob Stanley are themselves half a generation removed from the idols they memorialize so sincerely on "Over the Border," and their loving missive doesn't mean to limit or exclude anything. There's an awareness, however, that the complete devotion to music as an entire world will only make sense to a certain breed of people. That in itself is a hard lesson of adulthood -- the difficulty of finding "your own," so to speak. When you step out of this little world you make for yourself, it's like, who else will understand?

That's why the scene described in "Tonight," the masterful centerpiece of the album's first half, is so touching -- it describes a late-night gig, the music taking off, and being surrounded by the like-minded. The excitement generates an absolute giddiness that will be familiar to most of us: "This could be my life / This could save my life." And most importantly, there is this key revelation: "There's a part of me only they can see." That could, in some context, be an annoyingly trite line, and some would never let it pass their lips (Thorn, for one, a master lyricist, would probably scratch it out)... but the thing is that when you hear it in this song, you get it. It's a risk, a huge risk, because it's always a risk being as emotionally naked as not only Cracknell but the entire group is on these cuts, and the fearlessness and, again, openness of the result is startling. "Tonight" is matched by two other emotional peaks, back to back on side two: "DJ" and "When I Was Seventeen," the latter as much a heartfelt magnum opus as its title coyly suggests. If all three of these songs were together, heads might explode -- the tradeoff from "DJ" to "Seventeen" is that intense and rousing after the second or third time through.

With its undercurrent of rueful sadness unflinching, "When I Was Seventeen" generates the most complex feelings a dance song possibly can, its relentless beat underscoring its gorgeous melody and conceit, which means to capture everything about the importance of "those times" and does just that, while quietly beckoning to an uncertain future without ever filtering it through condescension. Really, this and "DJ" are dual celebrations, both vibrantly infectious and provocatively yearning -- for the band to have put them together in this masterfully paced program makes for bliss of the highest order. If the album as a whole didn't already have this effect, it's here that you'll feel compelled to turn the lights out and deal with the involuntary flashbacks or maybe just dreams. If they are merely dreams, they seem like more, like a burst of real life in a suffocating tide of nothing. That's exactly the way music feels to you when you're a teenager -- which is, no shit, the point. It can't be overstated, though, that this music is alive, it's beautiful, and its openness and warmth could make you cry. Close your eyes, fade away, etc.

DIIV: Oshin (2012)

(Captured Tracks)

When this Beach Fossils offshoot changed their name to DIIV (instead of Dive), the most apt response was from critic Chris Weingarten: "Who gives a SHIIT?" Indeed, this is the lowest, most limited-appeal depth of a certain breed of indie pop -- a curious hybrid of surf music and dream-pop that's become the specific parlance of Captured Tracks but has also infected more visible acts like the Drums and Surfer Blood. All this is more or less derived from both Flying Nun groups like the Bats and the long-forgotten throwback beach boys the Barracudas, whose records are practically a blueprint. This particular group's long-festering debut Oshin, though, deserves credit for its modesty. It neither claims to nor achieves any significant level of pop transcendence; it's easy to criticize it for washing over us ineffectively, but I'm not sure it completely intends to do anything else. It's a lazy record for lazy times.

That said, the hook is a severe one; the walls of jangly guitar on "(Druun)" and "Past Lives" stir something deep in us nostalgic types, and makes it hard to accept that this a record almost wholly free of complete songs. What we get is more fragmentary. When an actual voice finally asserts itself on the third cut, "Human," it's a bit of an off-putting shock. Said vocals are in the Kevin Shields camp, ebbing and flowing casually over and under the music and never putting across anything distinct lyrically or melodically. Throughout the record, they appear as an instrument at various intervals and can come across as alternately ghostly and vaguely emotive, but even at the rare points (like "How Long Have You Known?") that they're provided with an actual hook, it's endlessly repeated as though it wasn't considered worthwhile to complete the idea. That vagueness of spirit is nice in theory, but you know, even My Bloody Valentine had compositions. For better or worse, this feels like jamming and noodling that happens to be quite pretty but has little final value beyond ambiance.

Again, though, DIIV show an admirable restraint that both helps and hurts. It will take no leap of faith whatsoever to picture any of the tunes here as the evocative and winning score to the '80s throwback teen film of your dreams; they have just the right level of earnest wistfulness to back up less abstractly expressed emotions. On their own, it's like listening to, well, a film score... but one thing that separates this from the zillion other records like it is that only once does it cop to any kind of giddy retro-throwback trip, on the awful Miami Vice pastiche "Doused." In small doses, this stuff is great to zone or even to write to, but its squandered potential is depressing -- there's plenty of talent and a great sound here, and you wish they'd take it somewhere instead of grinding down into the ground with their ringing guitars until sundown.

The Antlers: Undersea EP (2012)

(Anti-)

RECOMMENDED

The Antlers' breakthrough Hospice was a bleak, drab affair; the follow-up Burst Apart an immersive tower of beautiful sound -- and this is somewhere in between, skewing toward the latter. There was a lot of press about it being some sort of highly ambitious project and/or exercise in defiant difficulty, but none of that comes across. It's mood music, something to change the color of a room for the moment, and it's splendid in that regard.

Just don't come looking for songs -- there's not a hook to be found across these four cuts, just a pervasive plodding along that's audibly the outgrowth of one-eye-open jamming. The music itself is competent enough but not beautiful; it's made such by (who else?) singer Peter Silberman's lilting, hypnotic vocals, always the lifeblood of the group. He holds your hand through lengthy dirges like "Endless Ladder" and provides a framework through which to appreciate this music's heavy, transformative but subtle charm. It's also not a bad introduction to the band; if you dig the vaguely despairing tiredness of it all, go pick up Hospice. If you like the singing and the music's ability to sustain a complex mood (for almost half an hour!) and wouldn't mind the injection of a little energy, try Burst Apart. Meanwhile, this is more than worthwhile to file in with your discreet-music collection.

[SEE ALSO:]
Hospice (2009)
Burst Apart (2011)
(together) EP (2011)

Frank Ocean: Channel Orange (2012)

(Def Jam)

RECOMMENDED

Gonna lose a few friends with this statement: this album isn't that good. I spent most of the year attempting to change that opinion; didn't work. It has sparks of brilliance that cannot be fucking denied, for sure, and there's no way around it: in those moments, it's like you're listening to Stevie Wonder in the late '60s, except with a modernist (for good and for ill) slant. And like Stevie Wonder in the '60s, Frank Ocean is a great, great talent -- the sole cultural benefit of the Odd Future phenomenon -- who's not yet come to full fruition. At least, not LP-length fruition. Not meaning to second guess the opinions of other folks who know far more about music than I do, I feel like we're treating My Cherie Amour like it's Innervisions here. There's nothing wrong per se with recognizing the latent pop genius within Channel Orange, but it seems to me that there's some overcompensation here for the fact that major labels no longer take the time to develop artists. And in and outside of the big business circuit, there's a kind of responsibility -- a sort of NYSE gambling -- to assure the future of those who are promising grand returns down the line but couldn't otherwise merit the necessary support to get there.

Here's what's wrong with this: when Ocean releases his follow-up to Channel Orange it will be leagues better than this; and the follow-up to the follow-up could well be a masterpiece. There's little doubt that he has it in him. But what will rockcrits say? Chances are they will respond with a wild mixture of thoughts nothing like the uniformity that greeted this record, giving the subsequent ones a few years of unfair devaluing and thus rendering the same growth they're pulling for stymied before the fact. This is yet another reason why the music business these days is lose-lose, but as I.A.L. Diamond said, why should I depress you? Let's celebrate what works about Frank Ocean's debut.

Listening to the album in sequence, the jolt to end all jolts is "Thinkin Bout You," somewhat conveniently issued as the first single, which opens as an almost reverent bit of '90s slow-jamming before Ocean unleashes the kind of loverboy falsetto that lengthy after-dark, uh, conversations are built upon -- it's an "Adore" voice, if you read me. The song's assured and gorgeous enough to immediately and unhesitantly put attempted soulfuck maestros like the Weeknd in their place, as nothing he's issued has the warmth and weight of this in writing or performance terms. Of the album's four other peaks, three are singles (or are soon to be): you already know "Pyramids" if you've been within earshot of any music blog or news source this year -- it's an idea-filled throwback mess, and could easily be ponderous, but Ocean's winning performance and enthusiasm keep it on the rails and poke subtly, tantalizingly at a cathartic peak that never comes... which is all the better, actually.

"Sweet Life" marks the coalescence of Ocean's pure grandness as a singer with producer Pharrell Williams' finely tuned way around a classicist, smoothly funky R&B ballad -- its moodily passive mid-'70s sound renders the lyric about wasted lives an almost Pet Sounds-esque example of irony, the blissed-out music hiding the paranoia. It's this track that most easily conjures up Stevie Wonder comparisons, as Ocean's method-acting for the luminary is uncanny, and he doesn't merely imitate, he fleshes out and twists the sound being referenced. Even that isn't a pure lift or imitation, for Ocean is well aware of the very 2010s tinge of fear and dread he's adding to a fluffy, familiar base; it's as perpetual and unnerving as the undertones of horrific propaganda injected into traditional girl-group pop by Cults' debut album last year.

And then there's "Lost," one of the half-dozen or so best songs (to my knowledge) of the year -- both a heartbreaking ballad about a relationship broken by drug use and a hauntingly intense midnight anthem that surges, bursts with momentum. It begins with a simple enough synthesized trill, backgrounded by traditional electro-pop that gradually builds, the arcade of adulthood, and comes to suggest both entrapment and escape on the immediately striking, cold-chill chorus with its ingeniously evocative but threadbare lyric: "Miami, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Spain / Lost." As if that weren't enough, Ocean spreads out to tightly controlled, lilting vocal interaction on the bridge that (let's add to the list of giants, shall we?) suggests both Marvin Gaye and Van Morrison -- the song sings him, as Greil Marcus would put it, and not just in a single moment but across layers of overdubs, bettered again by the supercharged, emotionally drained singing on the coda. At bottom of all this, we're looking at something so straightforward but immediate as a song whose music simply conjures up its intended emotions magnificently, a piece of storytelling told almost entirely by melody, voice, beat, production. I doubt Channel Orange is a masterpiece, but not that this song is. It's heading to radio in December and I expect we'll be hearing a lot of it.

Another cut that soars in far less explicit fashion is the Earl Sweatshirt cameo "Super Rich Kids," a five-minute marathon of great wordplay and greater, less organized than usual vocal playfulness that's taken on an incongruous darkness by the end, a suggestion of what Ocean was going for artistically for the entire record but couldn't seem to completely clutch. "Super Rich Kids" sounds like a throwaway that accidentally became good, but therein lies the problem -- the record is stuffed with irrelevant pieces that aren't so lucky, surreal cinematic skits and half-formed ideas like "Fertilizer" and "White" (an excruciatingly self-serious John Mayer guitar showpiece) that are unable to rise above their own frivolity. It makes the big songs stand out, easy to latch on to, but the record as a whole is made so disorganized and diluted it's hard to separate its greatness from its doldrums.

Some will argue that this very shapelessness of form is what makes the record great. I sympathize with this argument; the White Album's my favorite Beatles record! It's just that the wading through material may be worth it when your reward is a "Lost" or a "Pyramids," but when it's merely a half-decent cut like "Pink Matter" (with an excellent Andre 3000 spot, it should be mentioned) you feel that, yes, it's Playlist time. And if you're like me, when you separate the songs you want to hear every time here, you get about seven or eight -- which is why this is a good album, because any album with that may good songs is good, but any album that subverts all that with tiresome directionless pieces of "business" can't be truly great.

That said, it's disingenuous to pretend that Ocean's own skill isn't the very culprit of my disappointment -- when you hear "Lost" or "Sweet Life," it's hard not to want an album full of those, and it's almost a certainty that he could give us one. He chooses not to. Fine. But he also does this within songs, and if anything that's more irritating. I'm irked every time by "Crack Rock" and its matching of a delightfully clever lyric and brooding, contaied melody (along the lines of "Ballad of Dorothy Parker") with nearly the stupidest, least interesting two-syllable chorus imaginable ("Crack rock crack rock / crack rock crack rock" = instant skip). And why waste a perfectly serviceable keyboard creation like "Forrest Gump" and its sympathetically presented framing of a childhood crush on an allusion to a cultural artifact of far less imagination that even the lesser moments of Channel Orange, one that doesn't deserve the reverence he gives it here? The sublime and the stupid, all together, and don't forget that Wonder had that horrendous "Superwoman" track on Music of My Mind.

It's inevitable now that Channel Orange will top a large number of year-end polls, and I don't think that's a bad thing -- it's an imaginative and identifiably new record, yet one with a sense of history, maybe one of the first pop or soul records that truly knows how to deal with the baggage and deep past of its form. The individual songs have been presented with the analysis and investigation that's ordinarily reserved for long-acknowledged classics. And again, there's nothing about that that isn't good for new music in general and R&B in particular. But yes, Ocean will make far, far more consistent and stirring albums in the future, albums that will rush through you with abandon and leave you as breathless as the best songs on this one leave you now. For now, enjoy this, and don't let your eyes off this kid.

Advance Base: A Shut-In's Prayer (2012)

(Orindal)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my review at Metro Times.

Your opinion of this is likely tied exclusively to how you felt about CFTPA, but if they're in your wheelhouse, it's hard to imagine a lovelier slice of unbridled melancholy for your holiday season (there's even a Christmas song!) than this low-key, truly beautiful half hour. What I love most about it is that as dire and dark and sometimes emotionally raw as the songs are (especially "My Sister's Birthday," which just... oof), they are also consistently so playful and witty in ways both large and small.

Additionally, when I reviewed this earlier this year I communicated directly with Owen Ashworth and he was by some margin the nicest person I dealt with in the course of freelancing. Not that all this should influence your opinion of the music or anything, but for heaven's sake buy this thing; it's great and he truly deserves your support.

Suckers: Candy Salad (2012)

(Frenchkiss)

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Read my CRANK review at Metro Times.

It's not garnered a lot of momentum, but this is a fine pop record somewhat in the vein of MGMT's Congratulations with touches of the Shins and (why not?) the Beatles, and generally very strong songwriting and full-bodied singing. I don't know if it's anything truly great and artistically significant, but I get more pure joy out of it ("Turn on the Sunshine" and "Bricks to the Bones" give me a profound singing-in-the-car urge) than I have from most new music I've heard this year. Hideous album cover, though; I've taken to hiding the LP behind a bunch of others.