Review Summary: what is guster?
Is it the band you listened to when you were 16, going on your summer runs?
Lost and Gone Forever blaring through your headphones as your sneakers slammed pavement. The album still going as you spit up the protein bar you crunched beforehand. Is it the band that helped you make friends in college? The band you couldn’t wait to tell people uses hand drums on
some of their albums. The band you deeply bonded over with a friend. The harmonies of
Keep it Together and
Ganging up on the Sun ringing out in the dorm room. A heavy, thick-glass bong carefully passed between you two. Is it the band you listen to years after you last talked to him?
Well, it’s certainly the band you’re listening to now.
Ooh La La is their latest release and its title is appropriate, capturing the most superficial beauty of Guster. A quality that is sometimes indistinguishable from the band’s deeper, more satisfying pieces. At their best, Guster’s lush instrumentation and vocals are intertwined with compelling lyrics. You get a glimpse of something sinister. A moment of disarming self-awareness. A slice of life rendered vividly. On this album, you mainly just get the ooh la la. Which is still something!
The album starts out with
This Heart is Occupied and
When We Were Stars, which each have ear-wormy parts, but don’t quite move you in a memorable way.
All Day, however, grabs your attention and raises the emotional stakes. It has a yearning baked into every part of it - the guitar lick that becomes the throughline, the swelling synths, the little electronic touches sprinkled in, the beautiful vocals. The follow-up
My Kind has a crooner feel that threatens to but never quite comes together.
Keep Going contains the eponymous ooh la las, and is just a great Guster song, ironically containing the most captivating lyrics on the album. Those drums. Those harmonies. The way “It’s okay, I’m alright” is repeated enough times, like water eroding cement, until your heart cracks just a little. And
Gauguin, Cézanne threatens to keep it going and maintain some consistency. Ryan Miller’s vocals last just a beat longer than expected as his voice stretches on the verses. But then he undercuts it all and sings the “wax off, wax on” refrain from Karate Kid for some reason. And that might be the best summary of this album - almost always catchy, occasionally beautiful, with moments that don’t feel as cohesive as they should. Or just straight up pull you out of the energy the rest of the song is conjuring.
The latter half of the album is full of shorter, brighter songs like
Witness Tree and
The Elevator, which have a bit more propulsiveness to them and intriguing sonic textures thrown in.
Maybe We’re Alright has some classic Guster harmonies and vocal performances but ultimately feels a bit more aimless than a closer should be.
So what is Guster?
It’s the band that despite the many flaws and unevenness on this album, is still creating music I repeatedly come back to. Yes, the lyrics are more trite than they have been in the past. Yes, they could be more adventurous with their sound. But they’re still able to be irresistibly catchy. They’re still producing music with moments of beauty and clarity. It just takes a bit more work than it used to to find them.
