We've arrived at the final set of new adds of the semester. It's been a scary and wild ride, and I hope that this newsletter and the music it covers have brought you some measure of comfort or at least distraction these past months. Below, you'll find reviews of new albums from Perfume Genius, Car Seat Headrest, and the Strokes. But first, I want to use this platform to encourage any readers of means to donate what they can to funds benefitting those at high risk during the pandemic. Here are just a few suggestions for those wondering where to give $$$:

Keep reading the blog, where we'll continue to post reviews and other writing this summer, and I'll see you again in the fall! Stay safe out there, and have a lovely summer, such as it is!

- Lucy Talbot Allen, Music Writing Director

Perfume Genius - Set My Heart on Fire Immediately

Perfume Genius loves weird little animals. His affection for rats has become something of a meme among his fans on twitter, but he’s also recently tweeted a clip of a muscular man gently bottle-feeding a baby monkey, a screenshot of a youtube video called “Orangutans Need to Learn to Fear Snakes,” and a number of videos of some sort of bizarre chihuahua-balancing gymnastics being performed on a basketball court. There is an absurdity to this content, certainly, but also a definite poignancy. As Perfume Genius—real name Mike Hadreas—put it in an interview with the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino, “I always want little things to be respected for their power.”

Like Hadreas himself, Perfume Genius’ latest album, Set My Heart on Fire Immediately, is supremely dignified and elegant, but refuses to sacrifice the tender comfort of silliness. Even the title is over-the-top in its earnest passion, almost needy. It makes sense, then, that some of the most unapologetically melodramatic musical genres are quoted on the album: Orbisonian 50s rock, country ballads, baroque pop. The organ on the languorous album opener, “Whole Life,” evokes reverent gospel. These genres are, of course, refracted and distorted in typical Perfume Genius fashion. “Without You” unfolds over an uptempo beat with twangy pedal-steel guitar, but is laced with supremely melancholy strings and meandering piano runs. “Just a Touch” seems to pay homage to early 00s trip hop like Zero 7’s “In the Waiting Line,” but imbues the sound with a darker edge.

For already-enthusiastic Perfume Genius fans, Set My Heart delivers. There are echoes of Kate Bush—the string synths and galloping drum machine beat on “Your Body Changes Everything” recall The Ninth Wave, the sublime and disorienting conceptual suite about the sensation of drowning in the ocean that makes up side B of Bush’s album Hounds of Love. Hadreas delves more enthusiastically than ever on his newest album into the art of breakdowns. The stretch of languid ambience that brings “Describe” down for a few minutes towards its end mirrors the bars of muted organ and wordless vocalizing that break up “Fool,” a song from Hadreas’ 2014 album Too Bright. On both songs, these dreamy segments only strengthen the anthemic energy of the tracks’ hooks. On “Describe,” distorted, whining guitar thrums over a steady, repetitive beat as Hadreas sings from the depths of depression, trying to imagine what feeling better would feel like. “Can you describe them for me?” he pleads; “can you just wait here with me?”

The album’s penultimate song, “Some Dream,” features a stylistic shift that reverses the one on “Describe.” The song begins dreamy, echoey, and sparsely instrumented; then, a minute and a half in, a rousing, chugging guitar riff kicks in and Hadreas sings “I know you called me and I didn't pick up / I was busy freaking out.” The self-awareness of the line is as funny as it is touching. As is often the case in Perfume Genius songs, perhaps particularly so on this album, the words to “Some Dream” are darker than the stirring melody would suggest. “All I meant to love is gone to the ground,” Hadreas sings, “Gone the minute I stepped out and looked around.”

Though Hadreas has been in a relationship with boyfriend and musical partner Alan Wyffels for 11 years, the songs on Set My Heart often explore the uncomfortable, confusing, and tragic dimensions of queer relationships. “Jason” narrates a one-night stand with a straight guy over eerie harpsichord, ending with the anticlimactic couplet “I stole twenty from his blue jeans / I'm pretty sure that he saw me.” The songs “Just a Touch” and “One More Try” describe romances impeded by systemic homophobia, and “On the Floor” is, in Hadreas’ own words, “about a crush that turns into a really impersonal obsession.” The latter song employs a shuffle beat in the style of John Lennon’s “Just Like Starting Over,” and dulcet vocal harmonies that help to evoke that song’s Elvis-ish influence. Yet, in keeping with its theme of warped pining, “On the Floor” is filtered through layers of synth that obscure its influences before closer listens reveal them.

With the exception of sophomore LP Put Your Back N 2 It, each of Perfume Genius’ album covers have featured Hadreas himself. On the first, Learning, his face is completely obscured by a patch of what looks like wet paper towel with the album name hand-scrawled on it. On his third album, Too Bright, Hadreas looks polished, almost artificial, and looks off to one side; on 2017’s No Shape, he’s turned away from the camera toward a baroque pastoral mural. For the first time, Set My Heart sees Hadreas facing the viewer straight-on. He’s shirtless, grime-streaked, thin and muscular, like a turn-of-the-century coal miner or railroad worker. That image may not be a genuine reflection of Hadreas’ life or his artistic persona, but its very incongruence makes the record seem all the more genuine. Through layers of lush instrumentation, lyrical and aesthetic melodrama, Hadreas has crafted with Set My Heart an emphatic embrace of the vulnerability and intensity of having a body that hurts and a heart that yearns.

- Lucy Talbot Allen, Music Writing Director

RIYL: Kate Bush, Cocteau Twins, Orville Peck, Angel Olsen
Recommended Tracks: 2, 3, 6, 7, 12
FCC: Clean

Car Seat Headrest - Making a Door Less Open

There’s a certain stereotype that follows Car Seat Headrest albums. Reinforced by indie music meme pages—the modern take on legend—the band’s album Twin Fantasy is widely regarded as the pinnacle of elite lo-fi independent music, popular enough to become meme-lore but alternative enough to receive approval from pretentious Fantano-worshippers. If you fall into this category yourself, then you know what I’m talking about. Flannel shirts, Carhartt beanies, Neutral Milk Hotel… and, always, Car Seat Headrest.

Twin Fantasy was originally released in 2011 but only achieved widespread acclaim after it was re-recorded in 2018. Considering their somewhat newly minted prestige, it might seem strange that the band should appear to drastically pivot on their latest album. Making a Door Less Open, which was released via Matador at the beginning of the month, incorporates obvious shifts in the sonic landscape of distorted, thrumming electric guitar and lo-fi production that has so defined the catalogue of CSH up to this point.

On album opener "Weightlifters," Will Toledo raps off stream-of-consciousness lyrics in an untangling of depression and anxiety. A drawn out instrumental oscillates behind him before the song finally hits a satisfying peak: this is classic Car Seat Headrest. Only now, it’s to the tune of distorted synths, and not distorted guitars.

Toledo has cited a pointed increase in pop-music consumption as inspiration for the record’s heavier production. However, the parallels he attempts to draw (Post Malone’s "Rockstar," for one) simply don’t line up. The record’s simplistic use of jarring synthesizers is hardly on par with the impeccably overproduced pop music he claims to be pulling from.

What’s more, Toledo’s monotonous ‘reality bites’ vocal delivery doesn’t quite align with his new sound the way it did on Twin Fantasy and 2016’s Teens of Denial. This is no more evident than on the bizarre parody-track "Hollywood." And it must be a parody track, right? The track resumes the typical structure of a Car Seat Headrest song, but zaps it of its essential depth. “I’m sick of violence, sick of money/ Sick of drinking, sick of drugs[...] Hollywood makes me want to puke.” The sentiment never appears to land at any real anguish.

While many tracks, like "Hollywood" and the bizarre interlude "Hymn," feel like placeholders in a techno/ lo-fi hybrid experiment, the transition does begin to feel effective eventually. In addition to the opening two tracks, more bittersweet songs like "Martin" and "Life Worth Missing" hit their stride by expertly blending classic and new CSH sensibility.

Yet, Toledo has made his intent clear, creating a new alter-ego in the ultimate nod to rebirth. The mononymous Trait wears a full gas mask and feels utterly apocalyptic in the new fashion age of the face mask. Apparently conceived to distract from Toledo’s aforementioned legacy, it may have just worked.

But this transition is nothing new. In fact, it has become almost ceremonious for iconic alternative musicians to spend three records building a sound that culminates in critical acclaim, before pivoting away from the elitist indie genre they’ve been hailed under. Take Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City and Tame Impala’s Currents, both records that made their artists famous while serving as their last purely noncommercial work.

Making A Door Less Open doesn’t follow this blueprint exactly, as it's not the band’s fourth studio album and Twin Fantasy technically wasn’t even their most recent material. Yet the timeline holds up.

How can an artist continue to develop their niche when they’ve already embodied its pinnacle? The answer is, they don’t -- like Car Seat Headrest, they pivot, or else suffer the consequences of burnout and living in their own musical shadow. And so, while it might be sad to mourn the loss of geeky Will Toledo, embracing his new journey may be the only logical step towards another truly fulfilling album

- Barbara Rasin, Assistant Music Director

RIYL: Tame Impala, Neutral Milk Hotel, Parquet Courts
Recommended Tracks: 1, 2, 6
FCC: Explicit (Track 4)

The Strokes - The New Abnormal

We’d been waiting since 2013. And when Julian Casablancas announced that The Strokes would be back in all their pop-punk, indie rock, melancholic glory, it was hard not to feel a little excited. But unfortunately, The Strokes’ most recent work is possessed by a sort of inertia that makes it feel like the lofi hip-hop of 2020– easy listening, without the head-banging hooks that brightened up past albums.

And yet, it’s hard not to relate to the album. Fittingly titled “The New Abnormal,” it’s meant to be a reference to environmental degradation and the wildfires that have torn through the world in recent years. But an April 10 release placed it smack in the middle of the discourse surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and songs like “At The Door” seem to speak to our current moment more than most music that’s come out this year.

The New Abnormal is shockingly boring musically despite legendary producer Rick Rubin’s presence on the album, and Casablancas’ trademark incoherent lyricism betrays him on this most recent work. What the album doesn’t do musically, it definitely doesn’t make up for on paper. You get snatches of inspiration from Casablancas’ divorce, some attempted poetry on “Not The Same Anymore” (“A child prisoner grows up / to see his enemy’s throat cut”), and some commentary on global warming on “Eternal Summer,” but after seven years of bated breath, this album feels more like a sigh than a triumphant return.

Far too much is the same– from the synthy, guitar-driven “Brooklyn Bridge To Chorus” to the angsty “Why are Sundays So Depressing.” This album makes you tune out rather than pay attention, but something compels the listener not to turn it off– perhaps it’s Casablancas’ musings on being past his prime and “missing the nine-to-five,” something that seems particularly relevant while we’re all stuck at home, staring out our windows.

- Nisha Venkat, Music Department Intern

RIYL: Tame Impala, Arctic Monkeys
Recommended Tracks: 1, 5, 6
FCC: Explicit (tracks 1, 8, 9)

NEW ADDS: Perfume Genius, Car Seat Headrest, The Strokes