Spectreview: Men I Trust – Oncle Jazz

-LIGHT CORAL-

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“I don’t want to feel 
A world against our love 
I don’t want to grow old 
A lone broken heart”

Indie has its sound, and right now it’s the jazzy shuffle of a cloudy heart. Thanks to the once-unique bends of acts like Mac Demarco and Mr Twin Sister, the current trend of pillow-soft, melancholic, chorused offerings speak to a reactionary dulling of the senses, a movement either therapeutic or dreadfully boring depending on your interpretation. There’s no way to escape this double-sided coin if you pursue this sound as an artist, but one thing you can do is commit to it in a way that transcends the “flavor of the season” and reaches for timelessness. Men I Trust have built up a sizable following doing just this: their output remains a crossroads between indie’s deeper-than-the-decibels lyrical themes and chillwave’s narcotic gait, but behind the trio lies a subtle ambition that pulls them out of the mire and into something undefinably special. Perhaps it’s the universal inside voice of vocalist Emma Proulx, or maybe its the variety of approaches littered throughout their discography, but one gets the impression they’re not here for the trend. Their latest LP, Oncle Jazz, collects several songs they’ve released over the last two years into a 24-track, 70-minute smorgasbord of vibes that occasionally threatens to pull the listener into dreamland but mostly showcases how completely the band embodies the best sides of current bedroom indie.

The album’s best trick is how each song feels like a distinct entity despite the sonics being largely homogenous, apparently mixed low for warmth. While some songs objectively bear the marks of carbon copies (“Numb,” for instance, could realistically be a cover from Demarco’s Another One EP), there’s enough of a shift between each song that the band rarely feels like they’re repeating themselves: a sign of either smart pacing or thoughtful songwriting, or both. It helps that each band is technically proficient without being showy: on the syncopated  “Tailwhip” and the spacy “Air” they’re locked into airtight grooves, and on side-two opener “Seven” they even find time to let out a cheeky solo. Tracks like the Shoji Meguro-esque “Alright” even contain playing that wouldn’t be out of place in a contemporary jazz record, and this subtly blurs the genre lines, even if the predominant setting remains indie. Proulx’s lyrics are typical fare in this regard, but they’re well-crafted with a twist of subversion that may pull your attention, if only for a moment. Is the narrator on the excellent “Norton Commander” driven by true love or codependency? Where is the woman in “Pines” really going, and why? The answers aren’t as important as the way her words mix into the album’s heady swirl, but they do provide some sense of independent depth that adds to its substance.

It’s certainly a bold move to construct a double album of music in this style, and resultantly not every track is a winner here, especially when they lean a little too far into homage: songs like “Show Me How,” “I Hope To Be Around,” and even “Numb,” despite all being competent examples of indie’s favorite flavor, are a little dated and slightly nullify each other in their similarity, while album divider “Fiero GT” lacks presence in light of its thin guitar lead and “Poodle of Mud” is a cheeky pun that’s otherwise mostly pointless. The overall feel, though, is that of an embarrassment of riches rather than a collection of held notes: the cutting darkness of “Porcelain,” the goofy slap bass of “Slap Pie,” the cozy acoustic guitar on “Pierre” that turns displacing on “Something in Water,” even the solidarity of mysterious piano on hidden track “Poplar Tree”: everything has a place here, and it ties into a record that, by virtue of its ambition, showcases some of the best that bedroom indie has to offer. Whether your in a bout of depression or just coming out of it, Oncle Jazz seems to have whatever you need to provide a groovy soundtrack for your dallying days.

Recommended for the country dog, or the city life.