Foxygen – Seeing Other People (2019)

Foxygen – Seeing Other People

In a culture that loves to fetishize the past, many artists have been able to get by simply by presenting the sounds of the 60’s, 70”s and 80’s within their own individual capacity. On the worst end of this appropriation are bands like Greta Van Fleet who simply find a sound and parrot it back to us as younger people. It used to be that one of the best bands to provide us that kind of retro spin we crave was Foxygen. 2012’s Take the Kids off Broadway and 2013’s We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic both provided an original and even forward thinking look at their idols and the musical legacy they had to live up to. But since then, it's seemed that singer Sam France and everything else-man Jonathan Rado have been grasping at straws, afraid to completely devote themselves to an original sound and essentially cobbling together orchestral 70’s excess on 2017’s Hang and synthy 80’s excess on this year’s Seeing Other People. The album begins promising enough. The tilted and messy synths on “Work” are infectious and urgent. The song is unique, and breathes new life into the bands worn down formula, but at the same time it’s weird enough to still be decidedly “Foxygen.” The second track “Mona” keeps with the “Miami Vice” aesthetic, providing a simpering baseline that prances along pleasantly enough. The track continues a fun care free late night atmosphere, even featuring France belting lines like “The bomb's gonna drop in the club if you let it tonight.” It’s the kind of ridiculous guilelessness that Foxygen built a career on, and reminds the listener of the wide eyed teenagers Sam and Jonathan recently were. “Seeing Other People” pairs nicely as a simmering ballad inching along until those same synths arpeggiate into a climactic catharsis, but unfortunately it's just not enough.

After that, Foxygen gives up. The songs are still off kilter but they lack any real pop sensibility, clamoring over the same strange and discordant synths that by now have gotten obnoxious and distracting. On “Face the Facts” France’s overdubbed vocals bounce back and forth against each other, drowning out what ever kind of balanced delivery he could have given us. Those same vocals can now be heard much more clearly than earlier in the album, being brought way upfront in the mix and just in time for Sam to contribute some of the more cringy lyrics he’s ever sang. “I'm never gonna dance like James Brown, I'm never gonna be black, and I'm never gonna get you back,” is the kind of thing he must  have written down as a half joke placeholder and never considered again. It doesn’t make any sense, and it make you question everything you’ve heard up to that point. The lyrics from here on out are so over the top and the songs themselves so off putting and banal it’s hard to imagine they were ever considered at all. Seeing Other People is the kind of album that wants to be rediscovered years from now, reappraised with the kind of 20/20 hindsight that future listeners can use to chastise those of us who heard it on first listen, but that is not something an artist should strive for (just ask Gene Clark). The band while trying to depict their disintegration and re-emergence as studio focused musicians, epitomizes the strung out and worn out 80’s rock star, in more ways than one.

~5.5