I have tried and tried to learn to love Foxygen but I just can't do it. I mean, on paper it always reads like something right up my alley, however upon listening I just can't take very much. The band's newest album, Seeing Other People, is, in some ways, better than earlier releases by this band, especially since it's concise, even if parts of it are just horrendous. The record, out on Friday via Jagjaguwar, is the sort of release that will sorely test my maxim to only write about stuff I like on this site.
Now, "The Thing Is", for example, is a big, fairly okay pop song that sounds a whole lot like Corey Hart or "Dancing in the Dark"-era Bruce Springsteen, oddly, while "Livin' A Lie" is genuinely lovely, Sam France and Rado betraying a huge debt owed to Eighties-era power balladeers here. And that gets at the problem with so much of Seeing Other People: the record and its tunes make up a soulless approximation of genres no one really missed. I mean, opener "Work" is just dreadful, Reagan-era production effects oozing all over this like sauce at Olive Garden on a plate of rubbery spaghetti. It recalls those moments in the middle of the Reagan years when aging rockers like Bob Seger, Dire Straits, and John Cougar Mellencamp all nearly simultaneously decided that they'd benefit from an over-reliance on drum machines, and vaguely "modern"-sounding clanging percussion. The title cut is, however, the rare moment when Foxygen seem to get things right, adopting a subtle appropriation of past forms in the manner of acts like Jellyfish and Jason Falkner, folks who know how to look to the album rock legends and understand what to pinch, and what to let languish in the dustbins of the past.
On earlier albums, Foxygen pilfered from glam rock so I guess Seeing Other People is a step in the right direction as they're now scavenging a more recent era. And while it's easy to rag on so much of what's here -- bits of The Cars in "Mona", or the way that "Face The Facts" sounds like a song on a John Hughes soundtrack by an act no one's ever heard of -- it requires a little bit of an effort to find the nuggets of good stuff that's even here. But that's damn hard to do when "Face The Facts" features a line like, "I'm never gonna dance like James Brown. I'm never gonna be black."
Seeing Other People is out on Friday via Jagjaguwar.
More details on Foxygen via the band's official website, or their official Facebook page.
[Photo: Nicky Giraffe]