Passion Pit: Manners
2009, French Kiss/Columbia

Rating: 2.75

I encountered Passion Pit much later than most music fans. My world had already been filled in the past year by poppy, intelligent synthpop through the top-40 enchantments of Lady Gaga and the incredible cool of Justice. And so, coming to Manners left me with an ill taste that I wonder whether it would have been felt the same way if I had come to Passion Pit in the earlier part of the year.

Manners is not without its merits. Chief among them is Passion Pit’s ability to emphasize a wide ethereal scope with its dancey synthpop. Tracks like “Moth’s Wings” have an uncanny ability to feel like they could be played in the club or at some critical plot-changing moment in a character drama. And, to this end, Manners executes their formulaic brand of synth-pop incredibly skillfully. They evoke heart-wrenching drama in their songs using regular indie-rock devices like juvenile-sounding chanted choruses, 80s-synth melodies played against the drama of a full live band, and twinkling indie-rock guitar lines that do much to evoke the emo aesthetic of the late 1990s. All of this adds up to cliche though, and for that Manners suffers from its ability to evoke and finds itself boring in an album format.

Passion Pit are a band who’ve made an album out of bits that would make incredible singles, which is what frustrates me so much as a listener. I want to love this band, but the album as a concept isn’t developed. The album lags by its fourth track, “The Reeling,” which is an upbeat number, but sounds like an undeveloped single. From here every track seems touch and go leaving my subconcious saying “wow, this would be a great single” or “skip this, this is boring.” Filler abounds by the middle of the record, which leaves me, as a listener asking, “why?” The answer is its muddled aesthetic.

This is a record that is using all of the devices of a band like Justice, without any of the execution, largely because of their uncommitted approach to arrangement. While using formulaic devices like 80s-synth melody, the band lets the song decay into the mish-mash of indie rock formula on filler tracks, which results in this aforementioned muddled aesthetic that works perfectly sometimes when executing one device in a single and leaves me bored in the long format.

The album’s two strongest tracks, “Folds In Your Hands” and “Sleepyhead,” go all out against the approach of the filler tracks. “Folds in Your Hands” executes the synth melody so delightfully and tempers it against a melody-rhythm device that sounds like something out of Sonic the Hedgehog. The track defers the melody back to electronic choral manipulation of the band’s voices that feel confident. “Sleepyhead” similarly uses a sampled woman’s voice manipulated at such a high pitch that it feels like something out of the bizarre world of Max Headroom, which feels like a band confident in the risks it wants to take. It is these tracks where the band feels most comfortable with their aesthetic and feel most comfortable in their songs. I want more of this from Passion Pit.

A very real question has to be asked of bands like Passion Pit: in a world where Lady Gaga exists in the global conscious of popular music, is there room for muddled indie voices in the world of synth-pop? Hasn’t experimentation given way to refinement and expertise? Aren’t very real questions being asked of the culture through music rather than the culture of the music? I would like to invite Passion Pit to ask this of themselves before approaching the album format again. Leave the experimentation to singles.

via eMusic