The World Is Falling Down: A Quick Review Of The New Album From The Foetals (Temple Songs, The Pink Teens)

Jolan Lewis has been keeping a low profile these last few years. Back in 2015, the first album from The Foetals came out and it was a record that I loved. Not as obtuse as some of the earlier Temple Songs stuff had been, I thought that the release revealed just how easily the Manchester musician could craft pop-oriented material, even if it had the odd sheen that those best Temple Songs releases had. Then, faced with some health issues, discussed here in my interview with him nearly five years ago, Lewis took some time off. And while I was pretty sure that he was still making music, and a track or two would pop up somewhere, it was an enormously pleasing thing to see that a full album was coming out today. Songwriting Demonstration Tape is here and it's, frankly, the first thing you should buy on Bandcamp today.

For those of us who've been following Jolan Lewis from Temple Songs, to The Pink Teens, and on to The Foetals, it will be darn tempting to view the release of new music by the musician on Bandcamp today as a new Foetals record. It's categorically not that, despite how it's listed online. And while some of Songwriting Demonstration Tape feels very familiar, most of it suggests a refinement of Lewis' talents, and a sharpening of his brand of bedsit wizardry. If earlier band efforts were skewed pop, the sort of lo-fi that led the musician to PNKSLM in the first place, this is more Seventies Gold-on-a-shoestring-budget. Long-time fans won't be turned off by this turn, but they will be, like me, pleasantly surprised by the richness of what's here.

While "The House (Again)", for example, sounds like Temple Songs to me, the glorious "Someone's Gonna Love You" suggests that Jolan Lewis has a 10cc record or two in his collection. Like some other stretches of this lo-fi epic of an album, it's more Graham Gouldman than Ariel Pink, but this one, like the spry "Out in the Dark", elegantly mashes up the kind of hooks that were mainstream decades ago with the sort of textures we heard on old Temple Songs releases. The shorter take is that there's less clang here, with Lewis sounding like Nilsson, or any number of Seventies singers, at times on this release, at least spiritually if not literally.

For all the languid charms spread thought out Songwriting Demonstration Tape, some of this pops with the kind of assured urgency we heard on the earliest Temple Songs tracks. "I'll Be Home" has a hook to kill for, and verses that build up just as wonderfully until the song flat-out opens up atop a bright twang-y riff, while "TV" feels like power-pop of a sort, with a melody that snaps like some of the more upbeat songs on that first Fountains of Wayne record. Lewis, of course, is not writing tunes as big and poppy as those guys were, but he's as adept at finding a melody that feels familiar and which rings in the head on first listen. "Sleep", for example, opens like "Anything Could Happen" by The Clean, but the cut is closer to something by Squeeze in terms of how the catchy hook is handled (think "Labelled with Love", oddly). This one, and a few others here, have a sleight C&W vibe about them (the country honk of "I Made a Joke", for instance), but no one's going to mistake "It Ain't Love" for Hank Williams, you know? That one feels like a number from The Pink Teens days, but one sharpened into something fairly accessible considering the man behind it.

So much of what I liked about Temple Songs was the vibe that the stuff felt like old hits, played through a wonky radio, the melodies furtively nudging themselves into mainstream territory even as the trappings were all lo-fi. And while there's a lot of that here, Songwriting Demonstration Tape finds Jolan Lewis crafting more languid tunes, ones which ditch the garage rock for chamber pop ("CIA Pink"). But throughout it all is that dichotomy between the bouncy melodic pattern behind something like "The World is Falling Down" and the fact that this was all whipped up by a guy in his home studio. If that brings to mind R. Stevie Moore, that's good, even as the melodies here bring to mind those of Brian Wilson, Sean O'Hagan, and a young Robert Pollard. Listen to "Shaker Heights Spike" or "Easyworld" and you'll see what I mean. If this guy's odds-and-sods are this good, I can only imagine what he's got up his sleeve for the next proper Foetals release.

Songwriting Demonstration Tape by The Foetals is out today via Bandcamp.

More details on The Foetals via the official Facebook page.

[Photo: Jake Bowden]