Foxygen – We Are the 21st
Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic (3/5)
Contemporary rock music has been decried as an anachronism
in the world of hip hop and electronica, the sonic equivalent of literature’s
“dead white men.” All the trendy blogs
and publications (or wannabe trendy blogs and publications) have produced at
least one article attacking modern rock music for being stuck in the past. But these same publications also happen to
reward rock musicians who have an uncanny ability to ape past rock luminaries. I won’t go too far down the rabbit hole on
the subject of “originality,” but I will suggest that if you make music using a
computer instead of a guitar this doesn’t make you any less indebted to those
who came before you. (I’m often surprised by how much electronic dance music
sounds like it could have been made fifteen or twenty years ago). The problem with Foxygen’s album, We Are the 21st Century
Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, isn’t that the band wears its influences
on its sleeves. It’s that the musicians
have yet to figure out how to smoothly integrate their influences into a
satisfying sound.
Foxygen’s songs can be divided into two camps: one,
contained pop songs and two, messy rock collages. I’ll start with their smart, bite sized tracks
first, because they are the most immediately satisfying moments on the
record. The album opener, “In the
Darkness,” melds the melodies of the Kinks with the horn section borrowed from Sgt. Peppers. It’s a memorable and satisfying beginning,
and it foreshadows the album’s fulcrum, “San
Francisco.” (It seems as if a band like Foxygen is
almost contractually obligated to name check San Francisco). With call and response lyrics like the
following, “[boy:] I left my love in San
Francisco / [girl] That’s okay, I was bored anyway,”
Foxygen gets to showcase some humor and suggest that the band can fit both
homage and caricature into the same song.
By contrast, Foxygen’s longer, more freewheeling songs are
both more ambitious and messier. It
doesn’t help that it’s on these tracks that vocalist, Sam France, tries his
best to channel his rock and roll heroes.
There’s a moment on “No Destruction” that sounds less like a shout out
to Bob Dylan than it does a Saturday Night Live impression gone wrong. At their worse, these longer songs sound like
snippets of ideas haphazardly strung together without thought to transitions or
continuity. On the song, “Oh Yeah,”
Foxygen splice a Jackson
5 song into the middle of a T. Rex number, a combo that should work, but here
it sounds random, like they’re flipping back and forth between two radio
stations.
Foxygen’s intense knowledge of rock and roll’s back
catalogue is at times reminiscent of sampling in hip hop. But where the best hip hop DJs manage to take
disparate sounds that have no business inhabiting the same song and yet somehow
make them sound like perfect compliments, here Foxygen takes sounds that should
work together and somehow manages to make them clash. The exception is perhaps “On Blue Mountain,”
which moves from one idea to the next, taking unexpected detours when
necessary, but all the while building towards something greater than its
parts. This song represents the Platonic
ideal of Foxygen in practice. Obviously,
this band is talented, and they might even turn in a masterpiece if only they
could harness their gifts for the greater good of rock and roll.
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