I have a habit of not pushing myself to hear new releases all the time, waiting around for good records to somehow find their way to my ears, which is not a good way to do things if you want to be an even half-decent critic. So I spent the last couple days playing catch-up on a handful of talked-about albums I’ve been meaning to listen to—some newer than others—taking notes as I went and trying not to get overwhelmed by the glut of new sounds. Here are some short thoughts on them.

Chairlift - Something - I didn’t expect to like this as much as I do. Popular and critical praise aside, there’s been an overabundance of ‘atmospheric,’ 80s indebted electro-pop albums the last few years and I find it increasingly difficult to locate vitality or personality in those sounds. Chairlift can certainly be too ethereal for their own good—and they rely far too heavily on rote, marchy (boring!) 80s drum beats—but when they allow themselves to branch out, like on “Ghost Tonight,” they reveal themselves to be keen, inventive sound sculptors. The melodic strength and cosmopolitan poise of “Frigid Spring,” “Grown Up Blues,” and even the silly “Amanaemonesia” don’t hurt either. Basically, the further Chairlift roam from Drive-soundtrack retro moodiness, the better off they are.

First Aid Kit - The Lion’s Roar - This record should be listed in a Dictionary of Modern Music under O for ‘Omaha.’ These Swedish sisters have Mike Mogis’ country-folk-pop production, a guest verse from Conor Oberst, and those close-knit harmonies that start off pleasant but sour quickly from overuse. Ten songs of dusty strumming filtered through orange afternoon sunlight and wrapped in quavering personal angst makes for an adequately moving record, but it’s far from a revelation. If it had better lyrics it’d be a lost Jenny Lewis album, or add a dash of impetuous pep and it’d scan like Slow Club (in a good way) or She & Him (in a not so good way). Serviceable catnip for Saddle Creek devotees, but I doubt I’ll come back to it much.

Sharon Van Etten - Tramp - A diary full of hard knocks isn’t a prerequisite for making sincere, affecting music (let us never forget it!), but in the case of Sharon Van Etten it sheds a lot of light on what makes her compelling. Tramp’s backstory of her struggle to escape the clutches of a controlling boyfriend has gravitas and fuels some great writing (“Give Out,” “All I Can,” “Ask,” etc.), but you can hear it just as clearly in her voice. She sings like a strong person beaten down into deep weariness—never timorous or fragile, but nervy and exposed. Aaron Dessner’s production wisely mirrors her attitude, with guitars and drums that never get too comfortable in their own spaces, sometimes murmuring in the background behind a thick curtain and other times crowding in so close around her that they simultaneously smother and lift her up.

John Talabot - ƒIN - This may boil down to a personal preference thing. I like the idea of headphone dance music in theory, but in practice I don’t seem to find myself making a lot of time for it. I tend to think of it as something to zone out to, and maybe I’m just too much of a sucker for songs to get deep into it. Some of Talabot’s tracks hew closer to my comfort zones—“Last Land,” “Journeys,” “So Will Be Now…”—but others can feel angular and blocky in a way that distracts my ears. I hear the contemporary steamy ‘tropical’ influences at work, though thankfully they don’t overwhelm the record. There are also smooth, dark, even woozy sides to ƒIN and so far those are the better ones.

Beach Fossils - What a Pleasure EP - A more downcast, melancholy addition to the world of indie surf bands. Beach Fossils have never been exactly brimming with energy or emotion, but here they manage to widen their pale sound while letting the appealingly bleached, morbid qualities of their debut slip through their fingers. The guitars sound fine, but the rhythm section is still too thin and papery, dropping the bottom out from these supposedly-deeper songs and making them plod where their influencers pushed. I realize it’s an EP and probably a stop-gap on the way to the next album, but What a Pleasure demonstrates what it sounds like for a band to not go far enough, in any direction.

Caveman - CoCo Beware - Yeah, I didn’t think Local Natives could get any more snooze-worthy either, but here we are.

“…’Faye Dunaway’ take two,” mumbles Justin Moyer in a terse moment of verité that kicks off First Reflections, the otherwise spotty and confounding 2001 debut of his Edie Sedgwick project. It’s been a different ‘band’ every album, but in the beginning it was a bass-and-drums duo of Moyer and Ryan Hicks, both stalwarts of the DC Dischord scene. The blurb-able headline here, though, is the post-ironic (or maybe pre-ironic?) concept of half-intellectualized celebrity worship that serves as Moyer’s prime directive. Hence christening every song after a famous actor—Sean Connery, Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep to name a few—and flying it all under the banner of Andy Warhol’s most renowned starlet. It’s not quite the famous-for-being-famous vibe of your Hiltons and your Kardashians, but it’s in a similar vein: stardom as both a flimsy construction and a cultural end in itself. The band may’ve argued that it was all a sincere form of avant-garde adulation, but the album’s not so convincing.

Why talk about it at all, then? I only bothered to hear a few tracks from the subsequent Edie Sedgwick albums (including the electroclash drag show of Her Love is Real…But She is Not!, arguably the project’s artistic peak) and the pretense is questionable at best. Yet First Reflections—and “Faye Dunaway” in particular—have stuck with me ever since I first heard it almost nine years ago. People don’t often talk about how an experimental piece of music fits into their lives because they’re too focused on what it means in a super-social context. Pop songs can speak to you, for you, and about you, but a noodly, abstract, honking 2-minute jazz-punk screed about Winona Ryder speaks over you. It’s condescending. You’re not supposed to relate to it. But this record is great in the way that its rubbery, immaculate minimalism—clean, undistorted bass guitar and perfectly-recorded drums—creates a sense of openness. That’s why Moyer’s album-starting aside is so important: it reminds us that, in the end, this is just the sound of two guys jamming in a room. He shouts his beat-poet lyrics above the din as if they weren’t the whole point of the band to begin with. For someone like 17-year-old me, such comfortable sonic looseness paired with the wiggling, hyperactive groove of “Dunaway” could be all you needed to forge a new experimental definition of rock music in your head.

At least that’s how it felt back then. This was toward the end of the Epitonic era—remember?—before free mp3s came packaged with six press photos, a Vimeo link, and aspirations of ‘grassroots’ viral buzz. For me it ended up working out as a kind of free-associative exercise in music discovery, where Edie Sedgwick got lumped in under the general banner of indie with, like, TV on the Radio’s early stuff. I heard Daniel Johnston for the first time on an internet radio station labeled “Alternative,” sandwiched between the Elephant 6 free-jazz group Bablicon and, I think, The Crystal Method. It was a strange time in my life. I was hungry for all things unknown and unusual, trying to skew my musical vocabulary toward the underground largely without the aid of critics, record store clerks, cool older friends, or any of the traditional pre-net gatekeepers. I would get into all of that soon after I graduated high school, but for a brief moment I was out there on my own, listening to whatever bits came along and biding my time until I could get the hell out of Orlando and grow up already. I wish I could remember more of it.

“Faye Dunaway” feels representative of that time, though, and (perhaps not-coincidentally) also of the sorta-unrealized goals of the band. Moyer zeroes in on Dunaway’s famous legs, but he adopts the prima donna attitude traced most directly to the 1987 drama Barfly (Mickey Rourke plays Charles Bukowski—yeah, I know…) in which a camera tilt over her legs that wasn’t in the script was added at her insistence. “These legs are guns—you get the good side!” Moyer snarls, casting his muse as a ominous weapon both on screen and off. Dunaway threatens with her legs and Moyer threatens with her. That’s why it’s hard to buy the deflection of post-irony: Moyer sounds too vertiginous, too snotty, and too eager to prove a point here (too “punk,” in other words). It would take another album and a reinvention of identity for him to get it right. Here he seems much more interested in drawing out the depths of dead-eyed stardom, even using the obvious metaphor of makeup for his opening call to arms, “Come rouge! Come blush!” All across the album’s lean 27 minutes he can never bring himself to put it bluntly. I get why—“celebrities are shallow” would make for a pretty boring lyric sheet—but just as Moyer makes like it’s easy to see through the stars he’s memorializing, we as listeners will probably find it easy to se through him.

I keep coming back to this record, though, and I’m finding it hard to be satisfied with “I heard it when I was a teenager” as a suitable explanation. I mean, there’s a case to be made that biography is responsible for all tastes, however indirectly, but I hear something in First Reflections that I don’t hear anywhere else, not even in my all-time favorite albums: the willingness to not matter followed up by actually not mattering. I believe this is one of the most important functions of indie rock as a musical subculture—to produce works that go deservedly nowhere, which indulge in irredeemable pretension or numbing facileness, and which are still out there floating around in the back bins of record stores or the deep corners of the internet for some kid to stumble upon and make his/her own. No one in their right mind would burn this album onto CDs, print up little jewel case inserts, and slap a $15 price tag on it thinking that it would sell, right? And even the most blasé or die-hard punk critics would hesitate to give it five stars, right? It’s not ugly or unlistenable like so much other failed avant rock, but it has no lasting pop acumen. It interacts with culture—painfully so, sometimes—but it doesn’t position itself within the history of music. There’s no creep of nostalgia or tribute to beloved records here. There’s no reverb. In many ways it’s the opposite of what the indie rock landscape (which I still love) looks like today—a farm system for internet-tier pop stars—so it feels like just what the doctor ordered. Please continue to ignore it so I can keep it for myself.

I am taking the side that says this is a fatally flawed album, fascinating though it can be. Here are some more thoughts:

- While I hold to my previous impression of it, “Video Games” is indeed the best song on the album. It’s focused and evocative where much of Born to Die is a slapdash grab-bag of signifiers—one of the few that can be said to be about more than just, well, being Lana Del Rey. It’s also one of her most straightforward vocal turns, which is telling.

- On several tracks, she seems to be confusing jumbled wordiness for the kind of half-rap sass Beyoncé and Rihanna do so well. Is this supposed to be the ‘gangster’ part of her persona? Her vocal style is too slurred and manic to handle such rapid rhythms.

- ‘Trip-hop’ or ‘future cosmetics commercial?’

- She has a flair for stringing together some truly awkward lines. “Off to the Races” and “Lolita” are nearly unlistenable in this respect. Also, rhyming is more important than she thinks it is.

- Even more grating than her words are the way she modulates the timbre of her voice from verse to verse, line to line, and sometimes word to word. Everything from nasal-Stevie-Nicks drone to hiccuping-smurf giggle. She pouts behind the beat until she’s audibly out of breath half way through a phrase, which is not pleasant to hear.

- Not that it matters much, but these songs don’t hang together as an album very well. The sequencing is senseless and haphazard. It’s also about 20 minutes too long.

- The dubious ‘authenticity’ of her persona doesn’t bother me, and in fact I suspect it’s not what’s actually bothering a lot of people who grouse about it. Born to Die’s few clear-headed moments hint at a grand-scale tragedy of American dreaming, of messy, ignoble people wanting more than anything to be magically lifted out and given the kind of sparkly, beautiful new lives they’ve seen on TV, but knowing deep down they’ll never get it. On paper it could be the foundation for a Great American Novel. Here, though, I see it as a problem of execution. The bullet point images of smalltown bad girls, James Dean-ish hearthrob dudes, mid-century Americana, aspirational Hollywood glamor, etc. come so fast and smooshed together that it scans as subterfuge. Maybe we as consumers of music are just so used to incredibly well-executed pop personae that an alarm goes off the minute we encounter a not-so-well-done one. In other words: it’s not that she’s fake, it’s that she’s just not very good.

Anthony Gonzalez and his cohorts don’t seem interested in anything that doesn’t immediately paint the word “EPIC” in neon purple Helvetica across the night sky, do they? They have one setting, and that setting is called “soar.” They soar and soar and soar. And soar. And soar. For 74 minutes. If they’re not soaring, they’re meandering carefully, purposefully toward the next soar moment. I mean, soaring is fun, right? The purpose of this music is to body and simultaneously eviscerate the world-crushing emotions of teenagers. That’s what Gonzalez’s last album, Saturdays = Youth, was all about and it was pretty dang great. It worked in the same basic breed of stadium synth-gaze that we find on the sprawling Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, but it was also anchored in a very clear set of images that served as its spiritual guidebook: John Hughes’ romantic teen flicks from the 80s. Cheesy or obvious as it may have been, that pretense also imparted an essential up-front-ness to the album, as if Gonzalez were admitting sheepishly, right off the bat, “Yeah, I know, it sounds like Cocteau Twins. Let’s just go with it. Hey, remember Sixteen Candles?”

So no, pretentious doesn’t always equal stupid / pompous. Sometimes it can be nice to forget yourself and just be washed over by echoing tom-toms and borrowed nostalgia. But sometimes the wires can get crossed, the signifiers and signifieds switch places, and you end up with a double album of big, bright, velvety gestures that just sorta sit there and, well, gesture. My imagined conversation with Gonzalez about Hurry Up (as opposed to Saturdays = Youth’s self-aware quip) would go something like this. He: “Wow! Look at all the stars! Everything’s so beautiful!” Me: “Yup, it sure is.” He: “But I mean WOW! Just look at them! WOOOOOW!” Me: “No yeah, I get it, it’s nice.” He, whispering: “Yeah, wow…wow…” Me: “Okay I’m gonna call a cab and go home now.” I have little patience for this kind of crescendo-obsessed pounding that a lot of people call ‘post-rock’ (a genre whose ranks I think it’s safe to say M83 have joined now), music that swells simply for the sake of swelling. These songs sit heavy with effort—making sure you know that every wash, every chord change, and every downbeat is a monumental labor—and they work themselves into a grand, echoey frenzy, but I never really get the sense that an emotional climax has been earned to match the musical one. Hurry Up signifies a feeling without ever daring to provoke it.

We didn’t need a story, we didn’t need a real world
We just had to keep walking
And we became the stories, we became the places
We were the lights, the deserts, the faraway worlds
We were you before you even existed

These are the rather telling first lines of the album, whispered in a Gollum-y voice by Zola Jesus’ Nika Danilova—who slams the nail in the coffin by busting out her best Bono impression a minute or so later—over buzzy, urgent synthesizers. Considering the purposeful connection to filmic stories on Saturdays, the statement sits like a declaration of intent. And really, as soon as she says “We didn’t need a real world,” the real world gets summarily dumped for the skyward thrust of meaningless abstractions. There’s some business about lights and deserts and existence and whatnot, but who cares when there’s soaring to be done, right? Follow-up single “Midnight City” also squanders its chance at evoking a three-dimensional experience. “Waiting for a car, waiting for a ride in the dark,” sounds angst-y and teenage, doesn’t it? It hints at the essential aimlessness, the sheer and necessary boredom of adolescent life. But being the predictable crescendo junkie that he’s become, Gonzalez can’t help pawning his last scraps of relatability for something that sounds Important: “This city is my church.” Whoops, lost it! During the hour that follows you’ve got children narrating what is supposed to be an endearingly naive and idealistic story about becoming frogs and playing together, but which ends up literally describing a biblical plague covering the earth, some additional mumble-whispering about encountering big purple lights in the desert (See? Told you.), and lots more songs where—get this—M83 start out kinda quiet but then they gradually get louder (!) to look forward to.

But wait, isn’t it unfair to castigate Gonzalez, a non-native English speaker for one thing and someone who’s clearly more interested in musical effect than verbal clout anyway, for having crappy lyrics? And don’t you love your fair share of ‘meaningless abstractions’ disguised as songs? Why yes it is and yes I do! See, it’s the point at which things like crappy lyrics, predictable song arcs, and facsimilized emotions come together under one banner, the banner of Bigness, that Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming fails for me. Tom Ewing talked about the pitfalls of big-sounding music in his recent Poptimist column, about the ways that epic rock can function as a kind of secular gospel music, putting on the trappings of transcendence or transformation but only for the sake of aesthetics. Regardless of your personal fondness for or revulsion to it, you recognize on some level that you are being manipulated by the grandiosity of the music, by the salvation promised—but not delivered—in the epic sweep of it. Other kinds of aesthetic manipulation don’t bother me so much because they don’t purport to mean as much as something like M83. If a band fakes being quaintly twee or ruggedly folky or spacey and futuristic, I’m willing to meet them at least halfway because those sounds don’t usually puff themselves up with hollow grandness. The bigger the sound, the more obvious the dupe, and I don’t like the feeling of being duped.

Like I said earlier, Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, is about the outsized emotions of teenagers, about how everything feels weighty and eternal when you’re that age. Gonzalez’s synthy squall nails the bigness of it all, but follows in the footsteps of the most eye-rolling epic rock by ignoring the need for real, human substance underneath it. After a few spins you may find yourself in thrall to such wide-eyed sounds, but to stop and question—even for a second—what it actually means is to be confronted with the unintentional flatness of this record. Big sounds have their place, as does teen melodrama, but here M83 do a disservice to both by reaching exclusively for the purple, echoey, low-hanging emotional fruit.

Let’s confront the obvious part first: Molly Hamilton, of the new Brooklyn trio Widowspeak, has a voice with a lot of the same qualities as Hope Sandoval’s. She sings in the lower part of her register with a hint of huskiness and can, at times, drag certain notes slightly out of tune for effect. When Sandoval does it, there’s a distinctly narcotic vibe and her band generally plays loose and slow to accentuate it. The best Mazzy Star songs sound like they’re fading (ahem) in and out of consciousness. That’s not what Widowspeak do.

Widowspeak make tight, deliberate, carefully-considered songs. You won’t find tambourines and guitars languishing behind the beat here. In fact, you won’t find any detail that seems off-the-cuff or dedicated to atmosphere above development. This band has a gift for crafting lean, focused, and engaging arrangements. The guitar leads aren’t anything flashy, but they give equal attention to hook (“Nightcrawlers,” “Half Awake”) and texture (“Limbs,” “Harsh Light”), using only dashes of reverb or sonic grime. The drums have an earthy weight to them, a strength of purpose that neither pummels nor grandstands. Notice how, on the chorus of “Nightcrawlers,” the little bits of double-time gallop nudge the song ever forward, making it one of the most fun laments (a useful new oxymoron?) on an album already brimming with them.

“You think you’re low, but you can get lower,” coos Hamilton on “Hard Times,” another standout track. It’s a rudimentary break-up song set in the gray months of late autumn, and even as she bemoans not only the pain but the utter banality of it all—“We met at the end of October / it’s the same thing over and over”—the simple sweetness of her “oooOOoo” and the liveliness of the band around her make it sound fresh. That’s another gift of Widowspeak’s: they can redeem their own shortness of poetic lyricism with the careful rise and fall of a hook. Take for example the way Hamilton blithely slurs together the syllabic repetitions of “Fir Coat” (“it would still feel fi-ai-ai-ai-ne”) or the coyness of the aforementioned “Nightcrawler”s ode to evenings out on the town, “We won’t remember what we do.”

I would argue that Widowspeak is less a work of nostalgia than simply a work with clear reference points that manage not to wholly define it. Like I said, for all the Hope Sandoval comparisons, listening to Widowspeak doesn’t really feel like listening to Mazzy Star, and the other touchstones one might pick out—50s and 60s pop/rock, mostly—don’t tend to hold up as legitimate points of nostalgia in an era of such rampant pop revivalism. There’s certainly a sense of longing in much of Hamilton’s delivery, a downtroddenness or sense of loss (“Harsh Realm” especially), but it doesn’t bear a clear connection to time and place. Some of that stems from the fact that this is a band that’s figured out the “how” before the “what,” but a lot of it is just because not all songs about sadness and loss have to contain homages to the specific past. Invoke the 90s if it helps you enjoy it, but I don’t hear this record painting the listener into some kind of corner where that’s the only way out. It’s an easy distinction to overlook, but it’s why I’m doubly glad Widowspeak are around to remind us.

I like to think of Wye Oak as comfortable middle children of indie rock (if ‘comfortable middle children’ can exist), surrounded on both sides by bands with far more to prove than they ever will. Despite being three full-lengths into their career, Jenn Wassner and Andy Stack have never found themselves thrust out into a bigger spotlight by a critical / commercial success, so they don’t face exterior pressure to one-up themselves. They’ve also never ridden the blog machine on the back of a hotly circulated mp3, etc., so there’s no ‘hype’ that they’re then obliged to live up to. Plenty of late-decade bands exist in this perennial no-man’s-land, but Wye Oak is one of the few that sound at home there, like the idea of twisting themselves into something more ‘relevant’ and attention-grabbing has never even occurred to them. I mean, they do know it’s 2011, right?

The funny thing is if you toned down the guitars they could be just a few glockenspiel plinks short of Etsy-pop (my new favorite condescending descriptor) car commercial soundtrack ubiquity. Wassner’s voice hits this admirable point between deep, grown-up expressiveness and velvety melodic prowess, while the duo’s most accessible moments, like those on 2007 debut If Children or last year’s My Neighbor / My Creator EP—a favorite here at PN—show a highly developed ear for songwriting and a knack for subtle arrangements. They also just finished a tour opening for, uh, The Decemberists (speaking of ‘Etsy-pop’…), so there’s that. Listening to Wye Oak, one often gets the sense that they’re a band always on the cusp of something bigger, but also willfully evasive of any opportunity they might have to ‘break through.’ If you’re wired a certain way, this makes them very likable.

Fortunately, Civilian finds Wye Oak not caring at all that I think they could have a nice career “putting a bird on it,” so to speak. The new album is of a piece with their lunging sophomore effort The Knot (2009) in that it likes to offset their folkier, friendlier aspects with the dark clouds of Wassner’s distortion pedal heroics and Stack’s detailed backing. Riffage is an important part of what makes this band work, though (so forgive me if I seemed to downplay it), and this record does indeed one-up its predecessor by proving that Wye Oak can unite all their impulses under one banner. Opener “Two Small Deaths” fades from crowd chatter to dreamy harmonics, but it’s propelled the whole way by Stack’s tireless rim clicks and Wassner’s arpeggiating, an introduction that refuses to announce the album’s arrival with any loud, crashing fare. “Holy Holy” is perpetually unstable, punctuating its unresolving verses with scratchy bent-string vamps until two thirds of the way through, when they stop everything and bust out this satisfyingly grungy chorus that gets ridden out to the end.

Throughout most of Civilian, Wye Oak sound intent on surprising the listener with noisy left turns, a gambit that doesn’t always pay off the way they want. “Plains” spends so much time dragging its feet through long verses that its loud, intermittent trills—shocking as they are—seem to exist simply for the sake of shock. “Dog Eyes” fares better, hopscotching between a peppy Modest Mouse shimmy and thunderous slo-mo downstrokes. Though its dusty desert atmosphere is appealing, “We Were Wealth” is functionally one big 5-minute crescendo and there are already too many of those in this world. Plus, it’s a prime example of Civilian’s main weakness: the fact that Wassner purposefully holds her (very capable!) voice back, singing through her cheeks and letting her guitars do the talking. It’s a shame because, when her words are legible, she comes off as an earnest skeptic trying to get a grip on identity and faith. “If you should doubt, my heart, remember this / that I would lie to you if I believed it was right to do,” she sings to herself on the album’s spare closer, her fingerpicked guitar filling the room around her. It’s heavy subject matter that fits with Wye Oak’s slowcore roots, however out of fashion they may be. That’s one of the saving graces of Civilian, though: like I said, this band never set out to be fashionable.

And so, perhaps as quickly as it began, the nascent chillwave scene in American indie rock summarily ends. OK maybe that’s over-selling it just a tad, but it does seem that, with his second album, Chaz Bundick has learned what godfather Ariel Pink found out on his last record (we need not be buried in inverted lo-fi VHS haze to explore these old sounds), as well as what Dan Bejar proved with his latest Destroyer outing (the spectrum of ‘smooth’ music is much wider and richer than you think). Back when first single “Still Sound” appeared in December, I wrote about how it seemed like Bundick was an artist in search of his sound, already too big for the britches with which he’d first been fitted. Underneath the Pine, then, is our glimpse into the next step of his artistic development, though certainly not the final destination.

In a lot of ways, Bundick is still working within the same loose concepts of sonic nostalgia, laid-back vibes, and a sense of puppyish vulnerability that evades any bloody specificity, but the forms his work takes have shifted somewhat. There is the aforementioned “Still Sound,” which puts a blocky funk bass line against a slick disco strut for one of Toro Y Moi’s grooviest moments to date, as well as the sunshine soul of “New Beat,” which follows the trail of Daft Punk’s vintage synth squiggles back to Stevie Wonder, making a very strong bid for the most immediately likable song in his short catalog. But where these two songs are undoubtedly some of Pine’s brightest standouts (and likely fan favorites), they don’t actually speak all that well to where much of the album goes. Bundick builds a lot of these songs out of thick, iterating piano chords (Innervisions style) while also situating them in a kind of dated, almost nautical setting that can be too murky and harrowing to be rightly called ‘life-affirming’ (or some other such Wonder-ish term). Remember those short Sven Libaek pieces from the Life Aquatic soundtrack? Or “Bennie and the Jets?” I hear a similar 70s vibe and windy sense of adventure at work here, minus much of the whimsy.

That’s not to say that Pine is a dark album, but it is a conflicted one that inadvertently pines (!!!) for ‘simpler’ times the way the heavily filtered sounds on Causers of This did. “This is where I want you to take me when I die…underneath the pine on a bed of leaves,” goes a titular line from “How I Know,” as Bundick drapes his thin voice in ride cymbals and propulsive chords, but the ache extends beyond his words in places like the careening wails of “Got Blinded” or the spooky dissonance of “Good Hold.” There’s no doubt his songwriting is improving, but one only needs to get through the album’s first track—the slow-built groove “Intro Chi Chi”—to be reminded of his exceptional knack for production and arrangement. Where on Causers he used synth-y bedroom aesthetics to his advantage, here he transcends them by crafting a record that feels wholly analog, a one-man band that sounds like five veteran players.

This is how Pine earns both its greatest and most back-handed complement. It’s probably one of the best sounding records you’ll hear all year, what with its sophisticated soul-pop constructions playing so wonderfully against its ear-hugging production. But if that sounds like a tacit criticism of Bundick’s presence as a writer and performer, well, I think the shoe fits. The widening divide between his often wounded, mewling, far-off singing and the effusive energy and detail of his music throws into relief the variance in levels of confidence across disciplines. Like I said at the beginning of this review, though: all this means is that he hasn’t quite arrived at his wheelhouse, an idea that makes that much more sense when you remember he’s still only 24 years old and on his second album. In the mean time, Underneath the Pine is a highly enjoyable listen that provides more than enough reason to stick around for whatever Bundick’s going to do next.