Skip to main content

Beach Fossils – Bunny (2023)

Beach Fossils – Bunny



Give Beach Fossils credit, despite longtime comparisons to Wild Nothing, DIIV, and Real Estate, Dustin Payseur has always done a better job navigating the restraints of his sound. Beach Fossil’s debut is bright and lo-fi jangle rock, Clash the Truth brings a slightly harder and wispy, post-punk edge, and the underrated Somersault glistens in the sheen of a would-be major label debut. Each album is distinctly Beach Fossils though, the guitars and reverb-soaked vocals determined to reap the nostalgia of both fleeting, youthful summers, and the band’s own back catalog.

Bunny comes six years after Somersault, a gap that saw the band celebrating the anniversary of their debut through live performances with label mate Wild Nothing as well as the release of an album of piano renditions of the group’s past work. The pandemic could partly be blamed for the long wait time, but regardless Bunny still holds a lot of expectations, and when the band’s last album landed on the jazz charts, it’s hard not to wonder how the band will reposition themselves.

As an album, the obvious similarities fall on Somersault, an album that was about as bright and buoyant as dream pop can be. Album opener “Sleeping On My Own” has one of the biggest choruses the band has ever put to tape, but the melancholy drips in throughout, revealing the loneliness at the end of a relationship. That’s the format of most of these tracks, catchy melodies and crips production covering up a more personal turn from Payseur’s lyrics, still wistful but often much more dejected. This method works great for most of the album. The songs themselves are lean and memorable, never darting too far out of singular thematic sound and always just hinting at a more complex and mature subject matter.

The content of those songs is where Bunny waivers though. Vulnerability is not a weakness, especially for a group that could be accused of keeping their audience at arms-length, but Beach Fossils’ have lost the thread slightly, with more specificity comes more examination. Most of Payseur’s lyrics serve their purpose, they recall universal dissatisfaction or the foggy aura of memories and reconsideration. More important though is how he sings those lyrics, in a calm and haunting, overdubbed disengagement that makes them work.

On “Run to the Moon” and “Dare Me” in particular though, the exact particulars of the youthful escapades detract from the overall sentiment, and Payseur’s earnestness doesn’t elicit the sense that he has more to say and is simply choosing not to. Regardless, Bunny deserves credit, like each Beach Fossils album, for challenging an aspect of Payseur’s process, even if it was less effective this time around.

~6.5

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Concert Review: Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23

Wilco at The Riviera Theatre, – 3/26/23 Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood was once the center of the city’s booming entertainment district. Located at what had initially been the end of the L Train system, The Aragon Ballroom, Green Mill Jazz Club, and long-defunct Uptown Theatre quickly defined the corners of Broadway and Lawrence Avenue as the designated area for Chicagoans to congregate for the arts. As the area’s zeitgeist waivered though, the theatres grew into a weekend oasis of vibrancy amongst an otherwise casual and sleepy north-side neighborhood. Given Wilco’s consistent championing of Chicago’s local institutions, and another Uptown landmark Carol’s Pub in particular, The Rivera Theater seems like exactly the kind of venue for the band to host their latest three-night run and the start of their spring tour. Jeff Tweedy and company know the former movie palace well, playing there many times over the years and even using it as the base for a five-night series of performances b
Post a Comment
Read more

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain (2023)

Buck Meek – Haunted Mountain   Big Thief, one of the best and most adept bands of the 21 st century, has done more in six short years than most bands can squeeze out of an entire catalog. Each of their five studio albums has managed to expand their signature homespun charm into exciting, self-contained albums. The sound always moves forward but with distinct detours projecting their country-folk and singer-songwriter tendencies over disparate palates. The band’s prolificity extends to their solo catalog as well, the most notable inclusions naturally coming from lead singer and principal songwriter Adrianne Lenker. But behind her eclipsing generational talent, is guitarist Buck Meek, an artist who could easily shepherd his own headlining band if he needed to. Aside from some early, Big Thief-adjacent work, Meek’s true breakout was with 2021’s Two Saviors , a beautiful, alt-country collection of songs, most of which approached the quality, if not the scale of his mother band’s rel
Post a Comment
Read more

Fever Ray - Radical Romantics (2023)

Fever Ray – Radical Romantics Karin Dreijer’s debut solo album Fever Ray came out only shortly after Silent Shout , an album that was almost immediately hailed as The Knife’s masterpiece. The inevitable comparisons seeped out, no one was completely ready to accept the more cavernous Fever Ray as any sort of a replacement for the lush maximalism of Dreijer and her brother’s The Knife. Regardless, Dreijer had proved how essential they were to that project and by 2014, the two had disbanded. Fever Ray’s next album Plunge continued Dreijer’s push towards empty space with an angrier and more overtly political edge and simultaneously built Fever Ray into a proper entity in its own right. Radical Romantics is a Fever Ray album in that its fixations swarm around Dreijer, all their proclivities, and all their vulnerabilities. It’s also the closest Fever Ray has ever sounded like The Knife, whether it be the soaring and anthemic “Shiver”, or the pronounced synths ripples on “New Utensi
Post a Comment
Read more