Look, Pitchfork is a good, easy way to find out about some perfectly good bands. But sometimes their writers reveal themselves to have painfully short cultural attention spans, giving little regard to anything that happened more than a year or so ago. The site just seems to have gotten scenier and scenier, ever more obsessed with the new.
When your review consists of repeating some secondhand namedrop buzz and citing the same two influences twice each, and those two influence are no more than a year old, maybe you haven't cast your contextual net wide enough. Am I any better? Sometimes? But look, I do one of these a day, and I don't get paid to do it, and I'm old as fuck.
If it was me writing that review I might look at least as far back as mid-00's reverb-meets-beat dredgers The Russian Futurists and The Tough Alliance. Or better yet, notice that frontman Ruban Nielson was in a little band called The Mint Chicks (that put out my favorite album of 2009, maybe explaining my bile on the matter), and that this basically picks up right where the similarly retro-obsessed, overblown Screens left off. This is, by all accounts, the new Mint Chicks album, and seen from that angle its an almost-brilliant, bent take on the sound. Heck, I'd certainly point out the decidedly New Zealand sound on display here, what with the Mint Chicks influence, a dash of Gasoline Cowboy's vocal quaver, and a touch of The Dead C's bent, booming overdosage.
And honestly, if you're going to be myopic in your comparisons, how do you still miss the fact that this sounds a lot (a LOT) like the Ariel Pink album that came a year, nearly to the day, before your review?
Ok, ok, now I'm piling on and I'm a wiseass and an asshole both. Here I end up writing a terrible review as a way to bash a mediocre review. Who's the bigger fool, eh?
The actual goddamn record? It's fine. The beats are dusty and familiar like the best hip hop samples, covered in blasted, reverb-soaked melodies, with vocals that slur and bow, stumbling from warped Summer tapedecks. It's more interesting than it is enjoyable though; I miss The Mint Chicks frenetic bombast on this mock-followup, and I don't have that much patience for all this early 10's reverb and bend. I'm old as fuck, remember? 3/5
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