My most anticipated album of the year was released on Friday: Local Natives' Sunlit Youth.
There are albums where the first track completely takes hold of you - as LN's opener "Villainy" did for me - and the next track does the same - again as LN's "Past Lives" did - and again and again until I begin to say to myself, "Oh man, this could be a REALLY great album."
If I get through an entire album like that, it's a joyful experience for me hard to replicate in any other form. A couple albums this year have come close to that. I think of Anderson Paak's Malibu and Sturgill Simpson's release.
SO DID THIS HAPPEN WITH LOCAL NATIVES, you ask, pleadingly. It did and then it didn't.
As I got through the first four tracks, I was starting to get very excited. "Dark Days," their best song on this album, is track three. "Fountain of Youth," one of their most anthemic songs to date ("WE CAN DO WHATEVER WE WAAAAAAAANNNNNTTT!"), a sing-along to experience live I'm sure, is track four.
But then the albums starts to drift. The album is buoyed a bit by the mysterious and delicate "Jellyfish" - track six - the remainder wades without much direction. "Coins," an almost John Mayer-ish intro, is a weird direction and sounds misplaced on this album.
I'm not really sure what the majority of the lyrics mean either. There are all sorts of first names of different women of which no thread or theme I could deduce. There are vague references which may be specific to them but are lost on me. A few, like "Fountain of Youth," are a bit more straightforward, but overall I've never really understood their lyrics throughout their discography.
"Mother Emanuel" the other highlight on the back half of the album, soars on its catchy hook (which made me realize their singers don't really rely on catchy vocals but instead thrive on multiple vocal harmonies and lots of long "ooooohhhs" and "ahhhhhhs"), but I just haven't been able to find the rest of the album memorable.
Granted, I've only listened to the album all the way through a handful of times. I hope my feelings change on the end of the album, but I wish I got a warmer feeling from start to finish.
It's a world apart compared (and this just isn't fair, really) to the quality and ingenuity of Tame Impala's third album. But Kevin Parker is the rock genius of this decade, the Thom Yorke of today, what Kanye has been to rap.
So those comparisons just aren't fair. Though I think I make it because I've always placed my love of both Tame Impala and Local Natives at the same heights. Now those heights are changing because Tame Impala is in the stratosphere, cementing what is probably my second favorite band ever behind Radiohead.
I STILL can't get over how amazing Currents is as well as Tame Impala's preceding two albums. It helps that I just saw them live at the beautiful Greek Theatre in Berkeley where they were the best I've ever seen in the four times that I've had the pleasure seeing them. They were light years ahead of their performance a year ago at Outside Lands right when Currents was released. And they were even better, tighter with the perfect mixing/level of sounds, than my previous favorite set of theirs at Austin City Limits back in 2013.
ANYWAYS, there's a ton of other music on this mixtape. If you haven't listened to Isaiah Rashad, whose debut, Cilvia Demo, was a favorite of mine, please see if he's your type. I love him and think his new album is pretty damn great. Though as is par the course, Kendrick absolutely steals the scene in "Wat's Wrong," as he spews,
I told them, the best rappers is 25
Been like that for a while now, I'm 29.
Any n**** that disagrees is a fuckin' liar.
Pardon me see my alter ego was gemini.
Finally, I'll leave you with the great "Leave Your Light On," from the enjoyable new album from Night Moves. Now THAT'S a hook!