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.

When a no-longer-topical band comes out with a good new song, it forces us to throw our cards on the table and cop to our core values. Some people call it the Tyranny of the New, others call it Relevance, and many more (me?) don’t call it anything but still behave according to its principles. A few years ago when I started DJing at friends’ parties and such, I had a rule that anything between 1 and, oh, 7-10 years old was off-limits. You either play brand new (“relevant”) songs or you play songs old enough to carry an acknowledgement of age (“nostalgia”). Anything from that self-imposed dead zone felt stale and chewed-up, old enough for everyone to be bored with it but not old enough to trigger strong memories. As a DJ (or, for the sake of the argument, any public consumer of music) it would make you seem dorky and out-of-touch, not cool enough to be familiar with culture’s cutting edge the way you’re supposed to be. I’m not as strict about adhering to my dumb rule anymore, but I think I still do it on a subconscious level because, quite frankly, it works. I also suspect I’m not alone.

The funny thing is, even when you’re not choosing or performing your taste publicly, this same idea can govern the way you think about new music. In 2004, a once-moderately-hyped indie pop quartet called The Shins had a Moment. It was such a Moment, in fact, that most writers (including me, it seems) can’t review their subsequent work without mentioning it. You know how Christian Bale’s Patrick Bateman does more actual music criticism in American Pyscho talking about Phil Collins and Huey Lewis than John Cusack’s record store-owning Rob Gordon does in all of High Fidelity, but no one notices because of, y’know, the serial killer stuff? To me, the Natalie Portman Effect sorta works the same way. Her Garden State character’s dictim that The Shins will “change your life” is so absurdly nullifying, so hilariously sweeping that it cemented The Shins’ legacy before most people even heard them. It’s an anti-critical endorsement that continues to trump any critical endorsement one could give. (Thank goodness for Chutes Too Narrow, right?) Because the Moment was so big for an indie act—a Hollywood starlet in a successful motion picture endorsing the most prominently-featured band on its wildly popular soundtrack—the explosion of attention around The Shins had the adverse effect of freezing them in time in the public consciousness. No matter how much (or how little) music they’ve put out since, they are 2003-4 all the way down.

But James Mercer hasn’t done himself many favors in this realm, either. It’s been almost five years since the last Shins album—a fact that could probably banish them to has-been status by itself—and with news that he’d summarily fired the rest of the band and started over with a fresh crop of backing players, the idea of a new record has started to seem messy and a little desperate. (Not to mention…irrelevant?) “Despite the drastic changes to the musical landscape over the last half-decade, there’s still room for tracks like ‘Simple Song’,” concluded Larry Fitzmaurice in his BNMing track review. And though they were characteristically divided on its quality, the gang of critics at The Singles Jukebox also found themselves frequently hearkening back to the band’s past. This isn’t just a case of evaluating a song within the context of a band’s career, it’s an acknowledgment that The Shins’ shelf life has extended beyond their 15 minutes. The subtitle on the TSJ entry is “Remember 2003?,” as if that were the only year anyone ever listened to this band. You can hardly blame them, of course, but it does make this track seem ill-fated right out of the gate, no?

I like to think that some of “Simple Song“s anthemic qualities—the “Baba O’Riley” windmilling, the spine-chilling background melody that ascends the scale with tenuous urgency—are there as markers of hope, trying to convince your ears that The Shins, such as they are, still have enough spark and vitality to be a presence in the lives (if not the culture) of people in 2012. Whether or not you buy it depends on your relationship with their past, I suppose, but it’s worth noting that Mercer has remained fairly true to his musical self. His sense of melody, always scraping at the upper edges of his range, remains as simultaneously meticulous and delicate as ever, confirming that at least in the abstract sense he couldn’t write a not-catchy tune if he tried. “Simple Song” is recorded as a lithe pop ditty, too, the guitars never overwhelming the rhythm section’s sense of balance, even as they lead to and stomp all over those downbeats. It’s true that Mercer has neither the charisma nor the cojones to be a convincing rock frontman—he’s too boyish and wistful—but that’s why we’re fortunate his new attempt at power-pop still emphasizes pop over power. We don’t have to strain to accept a contrived performance.

Either The Shins are aware of this dubious sense of modesty or (far more likely) it’s intentionally built in. Mercer’s always tended toward knotty lyrics that hinge on, um, unusual images, but here he tones down some of the fancier flights and offers what may be his first straightforward love song. “Well this is just a simple song to say what you done,” he begins, in thrall to a woman who has apparently made him a much happier person, “I told you ‘bout all those fears, and away they did run—you sure must be strong!” I suppose there’s some eye-rolling linkage to be found here between Mercer’s saved-by-a-girl revels and the plot of the film that boosted his tax bracket, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking this isn’t a near-universal trope in popular music. And anyway, the more compelling lines come when he turns from her to face us directly. “I know that things can really get rough when you go it alone,” goes the chorus, offering encouragement through its sympathy. “Don’t go thinking you gotta be tough.” This isn’t exactly groundbreaking advice to get from a vulnerable-sounding singer, but it’s sage wisdom nonetheless. By the end of “Simple Song,” it seems Mercer’s learned his lesson, too: “Love’s such a delicate thing that we do, with nothing to prove.” And as he shouts out his new-found sense of assurance—maybe in love or maybe just in his band’s place in the world—what can we do but cheer him on?

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.

In Gothenburg we don’t have VIP lines
In Gothenburg we don’t make a fuss about who you are […]
The VIP lines are not to the clubs,
but to healthcare, apartments, and jobs.
Hey buddy can I borrow five grand?
‘Cause my dad’s in chemo and they wanna take him off his plan.

What are these lines doing here, smack in the middle of Jens Lekman telling a charming story about drunkenly tracking down Kirsten Dunst when she comes to his hometown to shoot a movie or something? There’s more than enough story here (Lekman’s narratives have been getting wordier lately) to carry a catchy, thoughtful song about celebrity sightings. Notice how his motivation for trying to find her is the fact that she dropped his name in an interview for the local paper. There’s an essay to be written about this: the glamorous American movie star being hip enough to know about the hometown indie songwriter, and he feeling a mixture of jittery fanboy-ism and a kind of professional obligation to somehow meet her and, I dunno, network in return? (Or maybe just try to make out with her?)

So what’s with the detour into Sweden’s semi-socialized healthcare system? The contrast between Dunst’s stardom, which demands special treatment wherever she goes, with the humbleness of the unassuming Scandinavian city seems ripe for a sort of update on country music themes, i.e. ‘we don’t have VIP lines around here because VIPs don’t deign to come here, we’re all just regular folks.’ But that’s not it. Lekman’s taking the opportunity to lightly chastise Dunst’s celebrity entitlement, using Gothenburg as a metaphor for equality (“You’re not worth less and you’re not worth any more”). The cruel irony is how inequalities still find their way into both the medical and cultural systems. The second verse contains the above aside about borrowing money to try to get around the healthcare bureaucracy, while the rest of the song finds Lekman and his friends talking excitedly about Kirsten, where she’s been, where she’s staying, etc., making the fuss about her that he just claimed they don’t. Even as Gothenburg the city doesn’t concede to special treatment, it seems the people of Gothenburg do.

This is presumably what’s gnawing at the back of Lekman’s mind as he drinks beer after beer in the streets. Dunst dropping his name confers a modicum of specialness upon him, a echo of her own stardom that he receives by proxy. Of course the hotel wouldn’t let just any drunk fan leave a note for her at the front desk (written in borrowed lipstick, no less), but he’s Jens-freaking-Lekman. Kirsten knows who he is, so he’s one of her special kind of people, right? Thus the receptionist turning him away—she doesn’t know or care who he is—is a hard but welcome slap back to reality. There’s no VIP line in Gothenburg for Jens Lekman either.