I worry it's going to happen: That part of my brain that's up for new things shutting off and leaving me with an appreciation only for classic rock throwbacks and smooth jazz. I'll buy a Michael Buble CD and that'll be the end of it. It would be death for me as a music appreciator if I didn't feel confident in my ability to discern good new stuff from shitty new stuff. While I feel perfectly fine dismissing a lot of what's out there for my own tastes, I need to find something new that I like often enough to make sure my tastes are kept sharp and malleable: to make sure I'm not set in my ways yet.The Naked & Famous isn't quite unlike anything I've ever heard but I wasn't sure it was a version of it I wanted to deal with. Before sitting down with it, I could've gone either way on it. "Punching In a Dream" has an intense, shrill vibe to it, might not have an incredibly strong hook, is mostly just a pulsing drum beat and a distant vocal and some buzzing noises. Ah, but it got my head bobbing. I bought this album knowing it was either my mind playing tricks on me with baseless doubts, or that the rest of the album wasn't even that good: That their experiments and work might've yielded a couple listenable tracks and a lot more messes. Not everything can be Foster the People.
Oh, but what an awesome mess they turned in. It's thoroughly cacophony, all sounds all the time, but everything fits tightly in place, even when the beats are off kilter and the droning noises pulse weirdly. Dig the chanting in "Frayed," or breathless, urgent tornadoes of sound like "Spank," and the opener "All of This." After "Punching," the other big song off the album is "Young Blood," which skips ahead on a light new romantic synth riff (maybe I'm the only one who is reminded of "The Safety Dance") and Alisa Xayalith's anthemic cry of "E-yeah-ee-yeah-eeyeah-eeyeah." Throughout the album she alternates vocal duties with Thom Powers. Both of their vocals seem distant and spaced-out, buried beneath layer upon layer of sound, fighting for breath. Alisa in particular seems breathless, at the brink of emotional breakdown most of the time. Like The XX, the two voices seem to temper each other, with Thom grounding Alisa, most of the time.
She gets some of her best moments in the slower numbers. "No Way" is quite symphonic and powerful, one of the moments on the album when most of the instrumentation drops out to let Alisa carry it. It reminded me of My Bloody Valentine (always a good thing) the way they can unspool a few of their instrumental layers seemingly ad infinitum, letting them sink deeper and deeper into you until catharsis has been reached. In a lot of places through the album, the band gets their best results by managing those intense moments with subtle ones. "Eyes" is similarly gorgeous. "The Sun" accelerates, charging toward its finish faster and faster like, well, a dawning sun. "A Wolf In Geek's Clothing" marries the spacey, immense harmonies with a squealing, painful, barnstorming garage riff.
"Girls Like You," led by Thom's pleading vocal, is possibly the best song for song's sake on the album. It's the one that feels most "real" and "down to Earth," on casual listening. It harnesses the album's strengths, that scope of softness and intensity, that sense of rough rhythm and emotional frayed wires, and binds it into a really effective pop song.
I don't mean to say, from my opening statements, that you have to be young or even particularly open-minded to enjoy this album. I definitely don't mean to say that disliking this album means you have lost your ability to discern greatness from crap, because although I like it very much I know it can't be for everyone. Everything that made me reluctant about it is true: It's shrill, noisy, obscure and far from pop in formula. Disliking it doesn't signify bad taste any more than liking it signifies good taste. It's important, though, for a guy like me, to happen across an album he can be unsure about, that can be unrelated to most of his daily listening, and still find new pleasures in. This album isn't made of great 3-minute pop songs I'll be humming all day. It's constructed out of moods and moments and moves between them in a way that is musical but not overly songlike. I find that it's more the case when you're young, when you're looking to find your own way and you want something to speak to you, that something like this album will speak to you, that you'll be more open to alternative, non-conventional expressions of music, mixed in happily with the rest, taken as regular as anything. When you get older, sometimes, you feel you have a more firm understanding of what works for you, and something that doesn't fit won't be up your alley. It doesn't mean you're dead inside, but it also might make you miss out on something you'll end up liking.
Buy this album now: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca
// Amazon.com
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