Look, I'll concede that they really tried and that their effort shows. It's actually infuriating how many ideas this has for such a flat result. Feels like a cake that refuses to raise in teh oven. One aspect of this is that the tracks are almost all very short. The boring ones don't have time to annoy, but the good ones don't have time to stick. There loads and loads of fun melodies here, beginning with the splendid intro ambient track. Rapidly in the album we are introduced to the idea that this will have lo-fi type beats to it, and builds a new direction for the band. Great to see, well executed, but ultimately the band's flaw catches them. While at first it feels like the lazy vocals work better with this inherently lazy hazy style, after a short while they make the songs feel all flat and underbaked. 2-3 is cool too, bit groovy even, 7 is a perfect example of the dream-hop style at play here, 11's got a great beat, 13's quite groovy, and the band intelligently tries to help with guest vox that are all really positive contributions, especially the female vox on 9, but also other ones including 5 and the rapped 14 and 17. The fact is, the songs are instantly made better by the presence of guest vox. For the rest I'm saddened to report that although I was hopeful at first this progressively bored me - I just can't stick with the band. Clearly their best effort yet though for sure. 3.25
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