Rapid Fire Reviews: Sleepy Indie with Braids, Feist & The National

I promise the rapid fire reviews are almost done. The next entire month is packed full of new releases I'm excited for and will be reviewing in full, but for the past few weeks I've mainly been playing catch-up before the year is halfway through.

Euphoric Recall - Braids

Braids are an indie act that I've always been nicer to than most critics, at least dating back to their 2015 third album Deep In The Iris. Its follow-up five years later was even better and gave me plenty of reason to be excited for new music from the enigmatic trio, even if the four singles leading up to it didn't blow me away. Apple is a song that grew on me over time. I love the beautiful vocalizations throughout but the short refrain it returns to over and over again never really did anything for me. The more I paid attention to the shifting tides of the instrumental the more I began to appreciate it. Evolution has been the record's breakout hit of sorts and is already well on its way to becoming one of their most popular songs. I get why the song's reserved demeanor and shimmering synth arrangements can be intoxicating at first but the more I listened to the track the less that magic worked on me. I think the track might be a bit too compositionally spacious and the non-synth elements of the instrumentation too straightforward for its own good. The most recent single Lucky Star doesn't do much for me either, it's easily the most boring song on the record and it being so fresh in my mind no doubt contributed to the record being included in the "sleepy indie" review comp. Thankfully I'm more fond of Reliever, the album's 9-minute climax which dropped as a single last year. Despite playing it pretty straightforward sonically by Braids standards I find it exciting, pretty catchy, and a good use of the runtime. 

In terms of songs we hadn't heard going into the album Supernova is a sweeping 8-minute opener that does take its time but I can't say I don't enjoy the journey and the conclusion it reaches is pretty satisfying. I've also surprisingly come around Millennia which had some garish sounds that REALLY turned me off at first. But some of the warbly vocal effects and piercing synths lost their edge after a few listens and I started to settle more into the song itself which does quite a lot right. What I like a lot less is the combination of swelling strings and unpredictable pseudo-spoken word on Left/Right which hits on some surprisingly dull lyrical moments, a complaint I've always had about the band. It just fails to really serve up anything compelling to chew on in any capacity. This record isn't bad and I'm certainly still a big Braids fan, but I can comfortably say it didn't turn out as good as I was hoping it would. The band certainly isn't slowing down their ambitions, but with how inconsistently they're executed throughout the record it just starts to feel more disorganized than anything else. 5.5/10

Multitudes - Feist

After a 6 year absence in studio material beloved Canadian singer-songwriter and member of Broken Social Scene Feist is back with another studio album. I've always enjoyed Leslie's music as Feist and I had no reason to go into this record anticipating it would be anything any different. Multitudes was produced by a personal favorite of mine Blake Mills, whose work with Perfume Genius in particular shows off a versatile genius for assembling beautiful sounds. The album led off with a trio of singles all dropped at the same time and the most exciting of the bunch In Lightning serves as a fitting jolt to open the album up. While the record averages out to something FAR more reserved than that opener I still appreciate the attention-grabbing intensity it leads off with. The other two tracks Love Who We Are Meant To and Hiding Out In The Open follow shortly after with the former being a deeply stripped-back and intimately sung ballad and the latter leaning into a different kind of folk influence with its percussion and group harmonies. 

Like a lot of albums from more earnest songwriters in recent years, Multitudes is a reaction to Pandemic era lockdowns which in Feist's case, inspired a lot of self-reflection. Those meditations are present throughout the album as is the intimate sound of the music with nothing ever feeling more than a few feet away. It's a rewarding formula that spawns highlights among the deep cuts like The Redwing and Become The Earth. I also enjoyed the record's other single Borrow Trouble which happens to be the second most exciting and deeply orchestrated song on the record behind the opener. It manages to soar to a dramatic high that feels special in the sequence of the album, without ever feeling like it doesn't belong. This album primarily achieves its consistency through two things, the production, and presentation of the songs and the thematic explorations Feist takes listeners on. It assures you that there's always something worth listening to and it delivers that something to you in a way that's both incredibly approachable and sonically compelling. Even though not every track here is a homerun and I think it might have helped the album to rev up the intensity one or two more times, I'm still pretty satisfied with what's presented here. The album's consistency is a major highlight that too many singer-songwriter projects tend to overlook and I can easily see it being among my favorites in the style this year. 7/10

First Two Pages Of Frankenstein - The National

After I controversially didn't really care for much of the otherwise critically acclaimed material from The National in the early 2010's, I found myself surprised to enjoy their 2017 album Sleep Well Beast. It felt like for the first time in years the band was writing songs with a pulse again and I hoped that would continue into future releases, but it didn't. Their last album I Am Easy To Find  is arguably the most boring and lifeless of their entire career and while it's dusted with highlights like You Had Your Soul In You and Light Years the record's hour-long runtime was one of the harder ones I've had to sit through as a critic. So for this album, the band has dug into the critical well even more and come out with features from Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, and even Taylor Swift. But I'm not sure what you guys want from me, this album is still The National operating at their most boring possible. The best way to demonstrate this is with one of the only songs that breaks the mold and one of the only singles I enjoyed Eucalyptus. While the track is far from upbeat it has rumbling drums, an all-consuming guitar bridge, and an infectious chorus all of which bring an energy and resulting interest to the song that is just plainly absent from much of the record. 

Too many of the songs in the tracklist here just completely lack anything appealing enough to pay attention to. Trying to sit still and engage with a song like New Order T-Shirt is about as difficult as possible because there's nothing to grab onto. Sure, I guess I can give the band credit for largely avoiding anything so garish, obnoxious, or noticeably underwritten that it stands out for the wrong reasons but that's a concession you make when you can't think of anything good to say. For the record, the album isn't just a sequence of duds surrounding Eucalyptus. While I'm not crazy about Your Mind Is Not Your Friend, the Phoebe Bridgers collaboration released as a single, I do like This Isn't Helping, the deep cut she appears on, a good bit more and it sports one of the album's best hooks. Surprisingly, Taylor Swift's appearance on the track The Alcott also goes over decently well and serves as a real beacon right in the middle of the difficult stretch the record puts together in the middle. I don't think anyone who reads my coverage of The National in the past really expected me to like this record, but I hoped I would like it more than this. While it doesn't drag on for as long as its predecessor and the tracklisting is certainly easier to digest, it also doesn't sport any tracks as good as the closer and opener from that record, and nothing that approaches my favorite National songs from records like Sleep Well Beast and Alligator. I guess I'm just taking small victories wherever I can find them. 4.5/10