#324 Starfucker - Reptilians

Really liked their last one, heard this one was coming and go go go.

Here's an album with everything I like. Great, buzzy synthys, beautiful melodies, unexpected turns, texture, texture, texture, but on top of clean lines. I know its a crutch, but if you want to get a sense of this album, think: MGMT, Cut Copy, Ratatat (Quality Time), M83 (Bury Us Alive, Quality Time), late Beck (Death as a Fetish, Astoria), a smidge of Adore-era Smashing Pumpkins (The White of Noon), and a touch of The Unicorns' squared-off buzz and general death fetishism. There's even totally Lamb Lies Down on Broadway synth on Julius. And I mean this all in a good way.

The whole thing is highly listenable, infectiously joyous, and well-paced*, mixing straightforward pop gestures and atmospheric soul-crushers in appropriate measures, sometimes pulling both tricks at once. Every time you've gotten tuned into what it's doing, it swerves, but pulls you along in a neon arc, momentum preserved and turned swooping. Slow, fast, dense, clean, twee, batshit, all in luxury car shifting with only the barest tug to mark the change. And then whatever that incredible clipped-static beat over double acoustic guitar move on Reptilians is.

The only thing keeping it from even loftier points (beyond my general stinginess on the matter) is the fact that it does remind me an awful lot of a lot of bands. Also, some of those Alan Watts samples get old pretty fast. But man, it is pretty. What a great uplifter/soulcrusher of an album 4.5/5

* skip the two bonus tracks, which overextend it past a perfect finish

Edit 3/16: I'm a fool, this way should have been a 5. Album of the year so far, easy.