Papercuts
(Gnomonsong)
Like sometime tourmates and collaborators in Grizzly Bear and Beach House, Jason Quever makes music that is almost too pleasant to appreciate at first. Its extreme prettiness lulls you so that it's hard to concentrate on the details. Quever's fourth album as Papercuts is an even softer-focus affair than 2007's excellent Can't Go Back. He envelopes his languid pop melodies in billowing drifts of organs and eschews his last album's subtle guitar-based tension. Alex Scally, on loan from Beach House, is quite possibly a factor in the shift, lending his band's trademark gauziness to these dream-sequence tunes.
Still, Quever has the sense to ground the hallucinatory textures of songs like "Once We Walked in the Sunlight" and "The Machine Will Tell Us So" in steady drums (Graham Hill) and bass. You float on circling patterns of organ, drift on warm tides of strings, but you are always moving forward. You Can Have What You Want isn't as immediately accessible as Can't Go Back -- its hooks are slower, subtler and wrapped in rainbow mists of indistinctness. However, they are there and repeat listens reveal strong, melancholy melodies amidst the atmospherics.
Standout tracks: "You Can Have What You Want", "Dead Love" "Once We Walked in Sunlight" JENNIFER KELLY
