Explanation of ‘Both Sides of the Coin’ Reviews
Heads:
The most surprising thing about Passion Pit’s sophomore album “Gossamer” is that it’s better than Vampire Weekend’s “Contra” and MGMT’s “Congratulations,” each of which were great albums by promising bands that, together with Passion Pit’s 2009 debut “Manners,” just so happened to perfectly refine the indie formula for mass exposure. Yes, you have them all largely to thank for the soundtrack to the endless stream of hipster-baiting commercials. Flash forward three years later, and Vampire Weekend and MGMT have become a lot more divisive, the former for their inability to live up to a fully formed debut and the latter for their reluctance to embrace the star status everyone was all but begging to hand them.
There’s something different about “Gossamer,” however: It doesn’t shy away from the expectations by diverting you to a new artistic direction, it rushes headlong like a bull out of the gate, ready to give the naysayers the horns.
It simultaneously takes the band’s sound and makes it more adventurous (“Love is Greed“), more stripped down (“Constant Conversations“), more dense (“I’ll Be Alright“), more relaxed (“Carried Away“), but the keeps the core intact. And it does this in the true lost art of rock ‘n’ roll, the single. “Gossamer” has singles, big, big, singles. Singles that you replay and replay and replay but don’t get any rougher from the sanding.
The first is “Take a Walk,” and admittedly for the first few dozen listens, it’s a bit underwhelming. For a band that made its name for being the musical equivalent of taking a battleaxe to a gumball machine, it’s a surprisingly tart blast of anethole, at once a meditation on the stock market, the sour quality of long-term relationships and the plodding steps that one takes when one walks alone, maybe.
But, while the song may be underwhelming to fans, it’s cookie cutter hook is attracting new moths to the Passion Pit flame. It’s been getting play at fashion shows, in department stores, the kind of places that nothing on “Contra” or “Congratulations” had the ability to go. And the word is ability. It takes ability to write good pop songs. It takes ability to grow your audience while sticking to your roots. Hiding behind balls and bucking the mainstream is so ’90s.
The real gem here is “Cry Like a Ghost.” It’s easily the best song the band has done to date, embracing the loose end from “Manners,” “Sleepyhead,” and making its iconic vocals, a seeming sonic anomaly, into a calling card. And why not? It’s what got us in the door anyway.
But, the key to this song isn’t the hook: It’s the bridge and the chorus. It’s how they make this hook a whole damn ride. It rises, falls, escalates and holds tension. And if you really listen, it’s a rather carefully constructed rubber band ball of all the albums we’ve been hearing the band name drop.
The R&B track we were promised doesn’t disappoint either. “Constant Conversations” is important for this band, perhaps the most important thing here. It takes Passion Pit’s sound and adds something of a downer to counter the sugar rush. The album could have used more of it, but that’s for the third album. For now, Passion Pit is shaping up to be the work of a true singer songwriter madman, and that will do fine.
Tails:
Uneven, overwrought, self-indulgent. Take your pick, but while accurate, none of these insults are quite right. Passion Pit’s sophomore disc “Gossamer” is simply trying too hard, trying to throw a million things at us to hide the truth: it’s too little too late.
At this point, the carcass of whatever Michael Angelakos, the band’s principal leader and songwriter, had going on has been picked clean by the Pitchfork piranhas and all that’s left is shiny white bones.
M83 took their sound to the dancefloor, Neon Indian picked up the slacker vibes (“Carried Away” even tries to get back by copping “Deadbeat Summer“), Youth Lagoon locked it up in the bedroom and cried all over it and Perfume Genius did… er… well, the same. The point being Passion Pit’s sound has been subverted, and while they go for the kind of big ticket anthems here that are meant to wave the indie flag and rally the herds to the festival main stage, it just all just reeks of capitalism.
But, boy does it try for the music fans. We even get a Passion Pit-via-“Kid A” track called “Where We Belong” to close out the album. Elsewhere, Angelakos is left sprouting vague truisms like “If you really love yourself, how can you love somebody else?” “We’re all having problems” and “Will I believe in you? do you believe in me too?” over glorified bubblegum pop for scenesters and Twihard hipsters.
In place of the earnestness that made their early singles so captivating, we get this processed pop gook, and Angelakos is smiling like he’s handing us some fine chowder.
Is this indie rock? I’m not sure. The feeling might be there, but it’s buried under a repeated formula and production that seems to have one abiding principle: everything up to 11. Whether the song is “I’ll Be Alright,” “Mirrored Sea” or “Carried Away,” the band can’t hide the fact that it pretty much only has one speed. It’s a good fastball, but sooner or later no matter how good your pitch is, you’re not fooling any batters.
With “Gossamer,” we get a few welcome changes, though. “Constant Conversations” and “Love is Greed” take the band away from the EDM explosion they’re openly courting, and the band could have benefited from exploring this further, though who knows how long it will be before these strands are carried off to a more perfect fruition with some other artists.
Overall, Passion Pit is selling the same bread, the same formula that kept “Little Secrets” and “The Reeling” on infinite repeat in college basements. And if anything, the album simply tries too hard, running itself in a million ragged directions to recreate the sounds that for one solid moment were able to unite the scattered herds of rock ‘n’ roll. Sounds like that moment’s passed.
VERDICT: Heads
Pete Rizzo can be reached at prizzo@thoughtpollution.com.