Spectreview 2/11/19 – Ariana Grande, Jessica Pratt, Panda Bear, sunking

For a guide to the color rating system, click here.

Welcome to Spectreview! Here’s the review roundup for the week of 2/11/19:

-DARK ORANGE-

A collaborative project between Antoine Martel and Rob Granfelt, both members of Seattle’s funk-fusion ensemble High Pulp, sunking is a delightful post-genre romp through beds of warm sonics heightened by deft jazz instrumentation. Several locales are visited here (the lush R&B of “All is Fine” and “AM shower”; the moody guitar squalls of aptly-named “shugazr”; the hungover jazz bathhouse vapors of “Trippin’ on Stilts”) but the main mood is that of vaporware’s sticky synths. The production, handled largely by Martel and mastered by Nathan McMillan, is astounding for a DIY project; the instruments come through crisply, and there’s an analog warmth that lends a familiar coziness to even the album’s most experimental moments. Granfelt’s drum work in particular slays.

Highly recommended for people in motion.

-FUSCHIA PINK-

Something about Jessica Pratt sticks with me, as if she’s always belonged to the classic folk pantheon. She is Nina Simone’s political subversiveness mixed with Marianne Faithfull’s world-weariness and Stevie Nicks’ umbral mysticism. Quiet Signs is her best album yet, largely because it’s her first foray into modern studio production. It shows. This record is freaking gorgeous: stark, densely melodic arrangements on guitar with additional help from flute, piano and organ. The production is achingly grainy, with an ornateness that has successfully carried over from Pratt’s previous projects. Her voice, a distinct pinched alto, wraps around her words like crawling ivy and pulls foreign sounds out, bending her lyrics into semi-inscrutability.

But that shouldn’t discount what she’s singing about. Lyrically Quiet Signs is elegiac, concerned with the consequences of living under submission and about the erroneousness of looking inside yourself for personal safety when your own mind has been scorched by your outer circumstances. In many of her songs Pratt is battle-worn, ruminating on lost lovers (“Fare Thee Well”), misguided advice (“Poly Blue”), and the seemingly inevitable downfall of humanity (“As The World Turns”). The cyclical nature of her depression looms heavy over her words, poisoning her relationships and bring her to question the worth of writing songs as therapy. Even as the album finds light in its closer, “Aeroplane,” Pratt is wary of her newfound resilience, knowing that a sea change could be just around the corner.

Highly recommended for people who don’t need an answer for what’s wrong with them.

-DEEP PINK-

In general it’s understandable to be skeptical of the integrity in pop music. Pop is designed to be flashy, to be surface, to sell. Even when something like real sentiment breaches that surface, after years of music industry machinations it’s tough not to conceive it as another marketing tactic.

But you know what? 99.9% of the time pop singers are as human as the rest of us. Ariana Grande’s had a tough few months. One of her exes passed away unexpectedly and another seemed to come very close. In her role as dance-pop’s reigning princess she’s in a better position than anyone to sing of self-care and self-empowerment. “NASA” is a cheekily-titled ode to wanting a healthy amount of space in a relationship, while “needy” attests to the importance of being honest with your emotional needs. In fact there’s a lot of honesty going on here, and not just the supposed honesty that tends to accompany blockbuster pop albums like this. When Grande sings about Mac Miller haunting her dreams in “ghostin’” or about the gratefulness of her failed relationships in the title track, you can clearly tell she means every word. Does she sometimes come off as manipulative (“make up”) or entitled (the admittedly fun “break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored”)? Sure, but she’s not perfect. That’s the point. She’s nobody else but herself here, and the truth behind her words is what elevates these songs from being standard trap-influenced dance numbers into vital empowerment anthems.

Recommended for Friday nights out.

-GREEN-

There’s some major changes to Panda Bear’s trademark reverb-caked homespun psychedelia. The first is that it’s not reverb-caked anymore. Perhaps sensing that trend dying like a old flashlight, or maybe just desiring a change of pace, Noah Lennox decided to work with co-collaborator Rusty Santos to strip the cloak off the bones of his voice. Unfortunately it’s been replaced by a dash of Auto-Tune which isn’t terribly flattering to the vocalist. It becomes evident that the reverb has historically helped take out some of the blockiness of Lennox’s notes, and it’s easier to hear little quirks like a possibly-mechanically-assisted vibrato or certain forced transmutations from affricates to plosives and realize Lennox might not be as close to Brian Wilson as we might have originally thought. Whether it adds a welcome earthiness or a plodding quality to his melodies is up to your interpretation.

The arrangements are minimal compared to Lennox’s previous albums under the Panda Bear moniker, excluding the somber elegies of Young Prayer. Most songs are built around acoustic guitar delay peppered with some electronic intrusions. There are some standout tracks (the soft sunlit “Inner Monologue” and the lilting country guitar rolls blanketing “Token”) but on the whole the album flies by without too much of an impression. Ironically, Lennox’s newfound clear voice houses lyrics that are pretty consistently nonsensical, and while that’s sort of always been his style, one would hope a newfound clarity would have lent itself to less opaque declarations.

Recommended for people just waking up.

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