I woke up this morning with two questions weighing heavily on my mind: Why do I never have the awesome cereal with pounds of marshmallows and sugar in my house? And, why has Passion Pit never collaborated with T-Pain and Usher to cover The Jackson 5 and make an album of electronic R&B for me to dance to?
So, I decided to solve both problems. I purchased a box of Lucky Charms and listened to Discovery's debut album LP. Missions accomplished. Once I got through my first bowl and my first listen, I realized that each goal was eerily similar.
Discovery, a project of Rostam Batmanglij from Vampire Weekend and Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot, has been in the works since the summer of 2005. Batmanglij and Miles came together in a mission to create an album full of synthesizers, hand clapping, and unapologetic auto-tuner use for you to dance to.
"Well, we definitely had a sense of humor when we were creating the music," said Wes Miles in an interview with Pitchfork. "But it's serious, too. It's not, like, serious serious, but, um...."
Yes, that about sums up LP.
It takes approximately fifteen seconds of listening to the album's opener "Orange Shirt" to somewhat grasp what kind of semi-campy, not-completely-serious sonic experience you are in for. However, it takes much longer to fully understand exactly how good that experience is. The music, which is free from the weight of self-professed importance, is in fact a seriously decent accomplishment.
"Osaka Loop Line,” the second track, stands out as one of the most accessible and best songs on the album. It is impossibly warm and thoughtfully slow for the most part. Listening to it now, I can't help but hate the dark and wet weather that Brooklyn has had lately. “Osaka Loop Line” is a song that I want to listen to while laying in the sun.
Angel Deradoorian, the incredible female vocalist from the otherwise underwhelming Brooklyn band Dirty Projectors (send your hate mail to someone else), is a guest on "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.” Despite (or maybe because of) the silly name and repetitive lyrics, the song's vocal experiments on top of the simple and bassy synth line work wonderfully. Discovery knows exactly what they've got in Deradoorian and they use her talents well.
For most of the album, Discovery walks an impressively thin line between subtle parody and earnest summer carelessness.
Picture this: you're listening to the album and you're smiling.
"This is nice," you might think. "It doesn't lift me and make me dance quite in the way that Passion Pit can but..."
Wait. Is that a cover of "I Want You Back" by The Jackson 5? I'm not saying Discovery pulls this off better than the 11-year-old Michael Jackson who made the song famous -- they don't – but it surely will make you dance.
The inevitable comparison (other than to T-Pain and other auto-tuner freaks) is to Passion Pit's Manners. Let's be frank: LP is not as good. It does not have a single song the caliber of "Sleepyhead.”
On Manners there is a masterful, joyous flow of chaos and emotion. But LP carries less chaos and more pleasurable simplicity. It has less explosive, danceable emotion and more plain old warmth.
Where Passion Pit consistently delivers some amazing moments, Discovery's LP is just really, really nice. When the album is released on July 7, inevitably in the midst of some unbearable heatwave, you'll probably need something that is just “really, really nice" in order to survive.
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LP is available July 7 on XL Recordings.
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