on the pulse - 2022 - #4 - beach house, spoon, frank turner, big thief, zeal & ardor, foxes

Okay, NOW I think I’m close to being back on schedule - a little exasperating because I think I could have gotten a few solo reviews out of this, but I just need to be better at making those when appropriate, that’s on me. In other words this’ll be long and likely more complicated, so let’s get On The Pulse!

Foxes - The Kick - …well, this is some quick turnaround time! Jokes aside, this is the independent full-length album that Foxes has been promising and one I did genuinely want to cover after her shorter project last year… and unfortunately, what I was deeply worried about from that last review has surfaced on The Kick. And I’m inclined to be charitable to Foxes here - she’s got a great voice, she’s now independent, she’s trying to fit within the modern pop ecosystem… but unfortunately she’s trying to play for the tighter, more processed nu-disco sound which doesn’t take advantage of her penchant for bombast, she’s just not as tight or dominant of a presence to make this work like a Dua Lipa or Carly Rae Jepsen, even if overall the basslines are pretty damn tight. And when you factor in some iffy vocal production that seems to hem in her power, not helped by a burbling, synth-heavy mix that can feel a little claustrophobic and overprocessed, especially the percussion which often feels clunkier than it should - hell, all the instruments sound synthetic, and it doesn’t exactly help some already so-so hooks pop, which is why the saxophone on ‘Gentlemen’ and especially ‘Body Suit’ stands out so much in a great way! Unfortunately, the other thing that doesn’t stand out is the writing - clearly looking for release from a lot of tension, be it on the dancefloor, a distant relationship, or a more sensual release as she pulls more self confidence to bear, but it’s nothing that distinctive or super well-constructed, and that’s been a problem with Foxes work since the very beginning. It’s not at all bad for what it is, sadly it’s just kind of derivative and forgettable, and even when I thought her work was a bit shallow before, I went back to it more than I’ll likely return to this.

Zeal & Ardor - Zeal & Ardor - The last time I covered Zeal & Ardor, I got a lot of backlash, and I get why: regardless of the murky place from whence this act sprang, my problems ultimately translated more into the execution in compositions and production, and it’s hard to get away from that assumed linkage. Since then I’ve seen them live at Sonic Temple in 2019 - once again I get the impression they may not be exploring the messy complexities of their sonic approach, but if it translates live folks won’t care - and now years removed from all that, I did want to give this a proper chance… and you know, I’m comfortable saying I’m going to get significantly less worked up about this band with this self-titled album, because while I don’t think this is all that good, the stakes feel a lot lower this time. And the place to really highlight that is the writing - where the roots to old spirituals were way more defined on their first projects, a lot of the lyrics here circle around some pretty bargain-barrel Satanism and nihilistic, anti-religious sentiments, with a few passing jabs at American myopia and industry but nothing that feels all that substantive or remotely challenging. And I have to wonder why, because while Stranger Fruit had its fair share of ideas that felt like dead ends, this album is all over the damn place, spanning from their usual bluesy stomp juxtaposed with black metal screams and shredding, to chugging riffs and breakdowns that wouldn’t sound out of place among metalcore or deathcore - complete with the undercooked basslines and triggered drumkits to match - to more synth-inflected passages where the band claims an industrial influence but it feels way closer to modern, pop-inflected alternative rock, with loud, squonking synths and programmed percussion. It’s the sort of mess that I’d argue only works in pieces if at all, maybe with singles targeted for commercial crossover - it’s the only way you could explain some of these choices beyond just mischief and experimentation in the studio, which seems to also be a thing as well - and thus I’m left wishing that overall more of it worked or felt more interesting beyond pastiches of other sounds, and minus a lot of instrumental texture or interesting production dynamics - frontman Manuel Gagneux produces and plays the majority of instruments on this project minus the drums, and you can kind to tell in how clean it all feels - I wish there was more to this in terms of compositions. Hell, more often than not I found myself gravitating to songs that were closest to their original sound like ‘Golden Liar’ and ‘Church Burns’… but even then, we’re not talking about much that works. Hit or miss at best, I can’t really recommend it.

Big Thief - Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You - Full disclosure, my exasperation with this band and album is going to make this review sound way more negative than it is, because on some level, this is not Big Thief’s fault. If they had stayed a middling indie folk band languishing on Bandcamp or picking up a small cult following from there, I wouldn’t have cause to care, not about Adrienne Lenker’s vocals that have never clicked, nor the shambling compositions that I find terminally underwhelming and questionably produced, nor the writing that I’ve never found to be all that impactful or interesting or ‘beautiful’. But since they got signed to 4AD and got a marketing budget and suddenly the critical acclaim is falling from the ivory towers… and I’m looking at the indie folk and country scene that will never get this level of attention despite having stronger hooks and sharper writing, and yet how many will truly go looking for them - you don’t have to answer, I’ve seen exactly how much traffic my indie country reviews draw. So when Big Thief drops an eighty minute, genre-sprawling project and the critical acclaim comes pouring in and I’ve once again heard so many acts touch on these sounds better - especially whenever Big Thief dabbles with country, which has the feel of Brooklynite hipsters playing the genre for a goof and it’s as tacky as it always is - it’s so immensely frustrating, especially when I don’t think this is that good. Some of the issues have carried over and puncture any sense of beauty or texture - I don’t particularly like Lenker’s voice, I’ve never felt any distinctive charisma or presence, and even if she’s more lively on this album it leans into a twee side that rarely if ever works for me - but some are more pronounced this time, like the production and mixing sounding uncharacteristically rough to go along with the shaggy, often sloppy-sounding compositions and guitar pickups that still never sound as warm as they should; that’s what happens when you record in multiple studios with different engineers who have wildly varying sounds! Which of course is the point: this is an album that’s sprawling and playful and that they clearly had fun assembling in the studios, which is why they left the studio chatter in and why the sequencing has no rhyme or reason, mashing whatever elements they could think off together with a growing sense of whimsy and “humor” to balance out the more melancholic tracks or that awful attempt at blues on ‘Love Love Love’, but I have two replies to that: this approach works best if at all when there’s a strong enough core of character and charisma to buy in, and an occasional hook wouldn’t hurt, which does not materialize for me, or you get the impression it’s building to something larger, that there’s enough strong shards to be more than the sum of its parts; it’d still be bloated, but redeemable. And… again, there are good songs here - I’m left wondering more than a few times why Big Thief got away from some of their weirder compositional experiments, as it leaves chunks of their album feeling not that far from a brand of clattering indie folk that as I said with Anais Mitchell was getting played out a decade ago, but sometimes the good songs still shine through with the ethereal wells of strumming on the title track and ‘No Reason’, especially with that flute, or the electric guitar sparking off the clattering ‘Little Things’ - you can definitely hear Shawn Everett’s influence blazing through. And even if I think songs like ‘Spud Infinity’ are impressively stupid and test my patience, the fiddle there, on ‘Red Moon’ and ‘Dried Roses’ does sound great. And while the lyrics definitely lean way harder than they should on homespun, twee, slice of life material - and without good sequencing a fair few songs wind up feeling redundant - when Adrienne Lenker leans into ‘bigger’, more abstract language to trace beginnings and ends and encompassing both the high and low oscillations of life and love… well, I did find some pathos, even if thematically I could rattle off a bunch of albums that hit similar thematic territory with even similar construction, most notably Pure Comedy. But I’ll end it with this: for me it’s decent, rarely bad but bloated as hell and wildly overrated, but regardless of how you feel about this album, if you like the flourishes into country specifically please go back through my year-end lists and take your pick of the names; there’s a lot of great acts that’ll likely be up your alley and will have nowhere close to the marketing budget or attention that this’ll get. I might think they’re way better than this… I’ll leave that up to you to decide.

Frank Turner - FTHC - The thing about world-shaping events like a pandemic, especially ones that leave you isolated and forced to look inwards is that more often than not you’ll unearth the roots, the incidental details or trauma that may have had a longer and deeper impact on you than you want to admit. And how you react to that can be extremely revealing… and when Frank Turner did it, he made one of his most raw, explosively punk, and deeply personal projects since the 2000s. Now as much as I’ve thought Turner has had standouts on every project the past decade, even on Tape Deck Heart there were guardrails, and in recent years it has left projects feeling compromised or lacking that added layer of introspection. Not this time… and it means we have to tackle the elephant in the room right away because there are more than a few songs that feel like a response to the criticisms his last two major projects got, specifically from those who thought the social commentary didn’t quite work. At best his response is passive-aggressive but still insightful in ways that often go overlooked in the better ‘responses to getting cancelled’ rhetoric - you can’t expect purity out of individuals, nobody is perfect in this working amidst bad systems, he did have good intentions - which for the record I believe even as someone who critiqued all of it - and social media can be a hellhole full of disingenuous callout nonsense. On the other hand, it can absolutely read as a self-flagellating defensive bad look that even knowing Frank Turner is more liberal than leftist can leave you feeling that songs like ‘Perfect Score’ and ‘Non Serviam’ and ‘My Bad’ don’t come across well. And yet I’m here to argue that not only do they make sense, they kind of work in an uncomfortable way: maybe it’s having been on the wrong side of a social media hate mob that on some level was bullshit, of which Turner’s been on a few times going back the past decade, but I completely get the impulse to go to this place emotionally when confronted with folks behind online shields of blackpilled irony who’d rather target someone as the villain of the day rather than put skin in the game and fight the real systemic rot or at least more relevant enemies. And you know, as much as nobody wants to hear allies grapple with privilege in the art, especially in punk, within the larger meltdown context of this album with Frank Turner confronting isolation, anxiety, and deeply buried childhood issues - including the clumsy confrontation with his absentee and now trans father on ‘Fatherless’ and ‘Miranda’ - it becomes understandable that you’re not confronting him at his best; hell, none of us are there, and that’s the point. Granted, that was probably true for the last few albums, but now it’s spraying into the open, only enhanced by the overblown production from bringing back Rich Costey that can almost be oppressively loud, compressed, raw and messy, especially when more synthetic tones come in. And while that can leave me frustrated with how the hell they micced their drumkit from song to song, I also can’t deny that this has the most intensity, momentum, and rage Turner has brought in years, and when nailed to some of his strongest hooks, it’s exactly the sort of folk punk that clicks hard for me, from the bangers of ‘Haven’t Been Doing So Well’, ‘Fatherless’, ‘The Resurrectionists’, ‘Punches’ to the heartfelt tearjerker ‘A Wave Across A Bay’ and the spoken word, country-esque reckoning with history on the closing ‘Farewell To My City’. So look, it’s not Love, Ire & Song or England Keep My Bones, probably the album that exposes Turner at his most human for better and worse - and it’s fucking great. God, this hit where it needed for me - maybe won’t for you, but worth a proper chance.

Spoon - Lucifer On The Sofa - Yeah, this is the kind of album that On The Pulse was made for - generally solid and completely worth talking about because this is a band that has decades of pedigree, but also not worth spending a ton of words discussing at length because… come on, it’s Spoon, one of the most ridiculously consistent and likable bands in indie rock, you know exactly what they do and have done since the 90s. So now five years removed from Hot Thoughts - a smarter album that’s aged better than you think - what variations on the formula do Spoon have this time? Well, a lot of folks are calling this a return to form, or at least to the thicker snarl that characterized their early 2000s work, with Dave Fridmann only producing the closing title track and thankfully avoiding a lot of his worst tendencies. Part of that is probably linked to Mark Rankin coming in as a producer for the majority of the album - more known for his engineering credits, but I can definitely tell some of the chunky heft he brought to Queens of the Stone Age showed up on a few tracks like ‘The Hardest Cut’ or the shambling groove and choppy acoustics of ‘Wild’ - but this album also has the most scuzz and blues rock tones the band has had in decades, to say nothing to how the pianowork translates on cuts like ‘On The Radio’ or the sax comes through on the title track, and that gives the project a different swagger. And I like a lot of the content as well - there’s a greater sense of emotional honesty that’s been creeping into Spoon’s writing the past few albums and when paired with blues rock bravado it allows more textured vulnerability to slip into the picture, especially in the face of so many larger forces beyond his control; a lot of men wind up damned if they don’t realize that and lose the battle to their darker natures. And… that’s kind of it? That’s not saying this album is bad by any means - I certainly think the production is better and the writing is solid but it’s not an album where the hooks grab me consistently, in comparison with their earlier albums or even They Want My Soul or Hot Thoughts. That’s kind of the double-edged sword coming back to familiar territory for a band like Spoon - it’s certainly agreeable and solid and diehard fans will love it, but if you heard innovations on their last few albums and wish they would have incorporated more of those ideas, you might be left a little cold, especially if like me you've been less interested in this style of blues rock for a while. Still really damn good, will probably be great for those who have a lot of nostalgia for early Spoon, and absolutely worth hearing.

Beach House - Once Twice Melody - And speaking of bands that fit really well into a format like this… the tricky thing with talking about Beach House albums is that variations in their overall approach and vibe are subtle enough that it can be tough to contextualize in a review, and really need to be placed in context of their larger catalog. That said, I was a little concerned about this new project, comprised of four parts and comfortably running over an hour, which can be a lengthy run for a dream pop record, even if the waves of critical acclaim was placing this among their best with Teen Dream and Bloom. And to me… well, when it comes to Beach House, it’s a lot of everything, showing their most facets all at once while still making what you’d expect. And as someone who has a specific flavour of Beach House that I like more than others - and given how sprawling and weirdly sequenced this project is, I’m more lukewarm on this project that I would like to be. Part of this is my general preference for the melodic warmth and swell that comes with more organic guitars, softer wells of synth, Victoria Legrand’s lower register, and live drums, and you certainly get those moments, but they’re juxtaposed with as many songs where the fizzy drum machines are right at the front, the higher register vocals are swallowed in reverb, and the cyclical melodic progressions and crescendos feel chilly or distant, not especially helped when they go for more shoegaze and don’t bring the grooves that were the greatest highlights of 7. And while some of those synth choices can work given the analog callbacks to the earliest dream pop of the 80s - ‘Masquerade’ in particular had a cool gothic trip-hop vibe with its darker flair that I think worked - it’s not consistent, so you get the oily mess of ‘Pink Funeral’ and ‘Through Me’ where the elegant attempts at melody get tangled, or how ‘Illusion Of Forever’ drowns in reverb, or the overprocessed ‘Runaway’ and ‘Finale’, or the weirdly insistent percussion on the back half of ‘Over And Over’ and all over ‘Hurts To Love’. And again, this is where a lack of coherent sequencing really hurts - I’d say it feels like four EPs mashed together but the larger truth is that none of the movements have a coherent style between them, so it’s harder for the vibe to stick and you wind up with pieces more than a solid whole, like the percussive romance of ‘Superstar’ or that supple pulsating thrum beneath the organ swell on ‘Another Go Around’ or that gorgeous strings embellishment on ‘ESP’, or really just how great the acoustics are integrated opposite the choral vocals on ‘Sunset’ or the incredible warmth of ‘The Bells’. And it also doesn’t help that for as much as I like the romantic language and framing of a lot of these songs - a lot of unrequited yearning, relationships that fall short for understandable reasons, and a whole lot of language around stillness and time and infinity that’s more to paint the sweeping drama of the romance - it’s hard not to feel like it doesn’t have the same thematic depth or complexity as their last album, all the more evident when this album sprawls the way it does. So look, I think there are enough songs here to have a streamlined, great Beach House album, but it’s bogged down with plenty that doesn’t rise to match it - definitely caught some vibes, not among my favourites though.