Review Summary: You need to let go
‘Cigarettes After Sex’ is almost too perfect a name for the Texan indie/ dreampop trio. Evocative of a hazy, meditative stupor in which everything slowly slides into place and simultaneously glows with an ethereal warmth, it’s so appropriate for their musical style it’s borderline sublime. Their music has the allure of a voice able to express complex emotion in the simplest of ways better than you can, much like transcribing a poetic passage into a greeting card for a loved one, but it also has a razored edge of depressive brutishness that frames the experience as an expression of extreme, if somewhat adolescent, sincerity. As much as the choice to smoke cigarettes is, at its core, an immature one, such habits often follow us well into our adult lives and where emotion is concerned, everyone knows that we all have the tendency to get just a teensy bit emo about the heavier things in life. This is the main hook of Camels After Coitus' music, and it’s a lure they’ve baited more thoroughly on some occasions than others. Their self-titled album was the cigarette after the fact: warming, bitter, welcome. Their sophomoric effort,
Cry, was inhaling the second hand fumes from your partner’s cigarette after you’ve already finished yours.
X’s is drawing out a second, sparking up, and lying back again contentedly. It doesn’t hit quite so hard, nor is it quite so satisfying or meaningful, but it’s worth savouring every pull.
Plodding percussion, svelte hooks and featherlight melodies interlace to form a selection of calming grey-sky cuts, each one their own enrapturing miniature. The style is much in the established ice-blue vein, but there’s a proud sense of incremental advancement after this disappointing
Cry, even if it does feel more like a sidestep from their debut than a bold step forward. Desolate, moody basslines backboard the comparative animation of the foreground guitar, and like all best Smokes After Shags songs, have a just-below-surface-level suggestion of anxious foreboding. With tracks like the penultimate ‘Dreams From Bunker Hill’, which laments the honeymoon phase of a stabilising relationship, there is a crushing feeling of inevitability despite the non-threatening, even upliftingly minimalist style. The absence of guitars in the verses is meditative, nostalgic, but their introduction during the chorus feels buoyant and hopeful as the heartfelt question is posed,
Do you want to make it forever?
Similarly, the vague plucking of strings on single ‘Baby Blue Movie’, giving way by the more pronounced strains of the bridge melody synchronise beautifully with the elegant simplicity of its lovelorn theme. The poised and glacially dreamlike mood is very much in-keeping with Cigars After Copulation’s established motifs, but the sincerity that rendered the self-titled so weighty and memorable has been re-captured and the content once again has that unmistakeable glow.
X’s distinctive tone and gently squeezing grasp on its downbeat preoccupations form a likeable combination, despite the overall tone. Lyrically,
X’s feels more verbose than previous efforts from Pipes After Piping; mildly denser verses and a slightly poppier leaning are present, along with a wealth of overtly catchy vocal lines. ‘Tejano Blue’ and ‘Hideaway’ both feature prominent vocal melodies that work in tandem with the echoing sparseness of the soundscapes. ‘Hideaway’ is especially successful due to the synchronicity of these elements, with frontman Greg Gonzalez crooning,
…and you put your arms around me,
Take me back to that hideaway…
…and give your loving to me
The manner in which the first line of the chorus draws out the delivery coupled with the hopeful fluidity of the second feels authentically emotional and felicitous. There’s a disbelief and a savouring of the loving moment that feels spurred on by the soft vibration of the melody, the percussion a fluttering heartbeat sitting at the song’s core. Such moments abound on
X’s, and although uniformly simple, all of the components are threaded together in such a dexterous manner the result is one of dainty, intuitive richness. Final song ‘Ambien Slide’, showcases this trait better than any other cut from the album, with an enthusiastic guitar hook and the liveliest vocal flow on the whole record. The darker lyrical preoccupation converges with the strung-out, airy melody forming a tightly orchestrated whole as Gonzalez whispers,
Take my love with Zolpidem
You said you couldn’t help it
Had everything that you wanted
When my love was only yours
But now you’re feeling helpless
Giving into your Ambien slide
Troubled but wonderfully juxtaposed with the syrupy, meandering guitar, the effect is one of artificial well-being against a decree of heartbreak, and it works exceptionally well.
Outside of those who enjoy listening to dreamy love ballads and accompanying musical landscapes, just how successful Darts After Doinking's music will be depends heavily on how receptive the listener is to embracing it’s melancholic atmosphere.
X’s is no exception in this regard; it requires a willingness to dive into its placid, moonlit waters and freely sink into the depths of the vibe rather than attempt to find thematic complexity or impressive musical chops. The power of the music lies very much between the lines, where the strains of the instruments stop and where the emotion of the vocals begin. The back-of-a-teenager’s-journal nature of the lyrics is given an inky, understated profundity by the musical harmonies, and affords the collection an elegiac coolness that gets consistently richer as the music progresses. It does feel lesser when compared to Blems After Banging’s debut LP, partly because a lot of the novel intrigue has washed away post-
Cry, but also because it feels slightly incremental in its employment of familiar tropes and introduction of diverting yet somewhat unnecessary ones. Nevertheless, the record still possesses an intoxicatingly spacey sense of style, the ambience of the music permeating the atmosphere and remaining like the smell of exhaled smoke. Whether it lingers for seconds, days, months, or even years after is a question entirely dependent on the listener.
