The Wesleyan Argus

Tag: dracula untold

  • all-caps LADD Considers Childhood With Dynamic EP

    Noah Mertz/Photo Editor

    “Well the kids/ I think we’re alright/ now we’re losing control.”

    all-caps LADD is a group focused on transition, whether it’s the evolution from childhood to adulthood or from college student to post-graduate. As I watched LADD, composed of vocalist Jack Ladd ’15, guitarist Sam Wheeler ’15, bassist Bennett Gelly ’15, and drummer Piers Gelly ’13, open for Avi Buffalo at Eclectic on Friday, Nov. 7, I couldn’t help but feel this performance was a victory lap for a band already considering its next step. Regardless, just because this is a band at the start of its final bow doesn’t change the fact that LADD knows how to own a crowd and bring a seriously addicting blend of rock, pop, and indie rock to the table. This band plays the kind of music that makes you want to get up on a table and dance to your heart’s content until that table splits in half.

    Mad in the Coatroom is all-caps LADD’s initial studio release and, though only three songs long, it provides a fleeting glimpse into the depth of Ladd’s addictive one-liners and the smoothness of Wheeler’s guitar licks. The EP serves as an intriguing statement for a group that has taken Grand Cousin’s—whose members graduated last year—mantle as Wesleyan’s premiere student band.

    Mad’s first song, “The Kids,” starts off with an up-tempo old-school guitar riff, each eight-bar progression building upon the next until Ladd’s voice nonchalantly saunters onto the track. Wheeler’s guitar sets an upbeat and youthful tone that the band distorts as the trio of songs progresses. The song is steeped in a blithely repetitive guitar sequence but is rife with pop influences.

    “The Kids” taps into the moment when parents realize their children are out of the house, out of their control, and essentially equipped to confront adulthood, if anyone ever really is. At the same time, for a generation of young adults in transition, the song represents one final grasp at the innocence of childhood and Ladd’s suggestion in the lines, “I’d like to take you to New York/ maybe we can start a band,” becomes increasingly urgent as Ladd’s vocals become muddled together until it’s clear he’s saying, “Don’t go.” Youth is certainly fleeting and perhaps LADD implies the dreams of our childhood are as well.

    “Summer Nights” opens almost hauntingly and crystallizes the sense of loss of “The Kids.” Its woozy keyboard line meshes well with a baseline that parallels the weary sound of The National’s Scott Devendorf. On “Summer Nights,” LADD continues to wrestle with youth and a vanishing childhood, beginning to distort these ideas into more vivid feelings. The song is driven by a creeping baseline and a wistful cry: “Summer nights are over/ I miss the nights when you used to fuck me sober.” While the song begins to feel repetitive in both the progression of LADD’s instrumental layering of guitar and bass and its lyrical content—a malady that threatens “The Kids” as well—it is able to capture perfectly the nostalgia of the dog days of summer. Ladd looks back once again with almost bereavement, but in “Nights,” his perspective is tinged with regret and even guilt.

    “Summer Nights” is not a shallow or preening attempt to capture the passion of summer love. Rather, it is an honest look at the aftermath of a summer romance and the way we reflect on it and allow it to characterize our behavior once the year begins. When Ladd admits, “I feel like shit for all the ways I fucked you over,” his voice descending into a dizzy and syncopated plea for forgiveness, it’s clear why the “summer days grow colder.” Ladd examines a relationship gone awry, and questions all the ways he could have salvaged it, rather than letting it dissolve into just another summer fling that ends in regret.

    “Mad in the Coatroom,” the project’s eponymous track, concludes the record on decidedly different terms than the regret of “Summer Nights” or the thinly veiled melancholy of “The Kids.” It’s also far more expansive instrumentally than either of its predecessors, as Ladd and Wheeler are able to weave intricate guitar patterns that immediately declare a different experience. While “Mad” is still driven by its baseline, it’s more Gaslight Anthem than The National. In an EP driven so fully by each track’s instrumentals, Wheeler’s ability to improvise and play off drummer Piers Gelly ’13 and fellow guitarist Ladd sets a perfect tone here. “Mad In The Coatroom” sees LADD firing on all cylinders, as their percussion, guitar, and keyboard converge perfectly in a dazzling burst of sound. “Mad in The Coatroom” is my favorite song from the EP and represents LADD’s most fully realized piece on all levels.

    On “Mad,” Ladd strives to expand his vocal range, and his lyrics are his most dynamic and daring. Throughout the EP, he is able to lace each track with ambiguous lines that serve as driving questions as the song expands. Of course, he is still “thinking about you” and trying to “get somebody to notice.” However, on “Mad in The Coatroom,” Ladd’s imagery is far more pointed: “She found a pack of bruised Camel Turkish cigarettes in my pocket.” His voice seems more focused, perhaps because “Mad” offers some allusion to a resolution of the questions Ladd poses in both “The Kids” and “Summer Nights.” When he sings, not without some hope, “She said I could finally get to rest my head soon,” the closure Ladd seeks so adamantly throughout the EP seems miraculously in reach.

    Mad In The Coatroom is an EP about the lens through which we evaluate our childhood, filled with both pleasurable and regretful memories. Instead of judging or indicting ourselves for our past mistakes, it seeks to find the resolution that will make our next chapter more fulfilling.

  • Perfume Genius Lightens Up Sound With Too Bright

    I can think of few songs as harrowing as Perfume Genius’ “Learning,” the title track off his overlooked 2010 debut. Since the release of Learning, Perfume Genius (off-stage, Mike Hadreas) has labored under the radar, crafting two more albums of intricate yearning pop that dares to address difficult subjects without mitigating or ignoring their complexity and darkness. This alone would deserve praise, but as anyone who has followed Hadreas knows, the wonder of the music stretches far beyond the bravery of the subject matter. Not only has Hadreas tackled topics in ways that would terrify a less impressive artist, he has done so within some of the most arresting and breathtaking music of the last decade.

    Too Bright, Hadreas’ third album under the Perfume Genius moniker, is no exception, even though it strays from and expands upon the Perfume Genius sonic palette. This has all been part of a steady progression. After the release of Put Your Back N 2 It, critics rightly noted that Hadreas’ music was brightening, combining the almost unrelenting melancholy of Learning with fuller arrangements. If Learning was defined by its spare piano-based aesthetic, Put Your Back N 2 It was proof that Hadreas was more than able to expand, allowing thicker sounds to flower out of a well-established foundation.

    This continues on Too Bright, which is arguably the happiest of Perfume Genius’ work, if only by virtue of its predecessors’ cutting bleakness. However, just like on Put Your Back N 2 It, every new musical and thematic facet feels wholly organic, as if each track is in intentioned conversation with those surrounding it. Opener “I Decline,” which makes use of the same simple piano that dominated Learning’s tracklist, seems both to engage with and question that simplicity, reaching outwards in its very first lyric (“I can see for miles”). This ethos of conversation is further highlighted later in the album when that lyric is repeated on “Grid.” Sonically, “I Decline” and “Grid” could not be more different. Whereas the former unfolds in hazy, mournful, elegiac tones, the later charges forward along a hungry and insistent bass line that is periodically thrown aside by sharp, bracing electric screeching. It’s an unnerving experience, and yet it somehow makes perfect sense. It underscores Hadreas’ impulse to be both attended to and undermined. Furthermore, it marks Too Bright as an album of growth through recontextualization, a record that seeks to harness the raw and unashamed anguish of its predecessors and channel it into an altogether different breed of ferociousness. In the same way that one lyric can be the seed of two vastly different experiences, Too Bright time and time again seems to argue that any one emotional force can grow in a host of directions.

    This is not to say that Too Bright positions itself as a record of straightforward healing. As anyone who has explored Hadreas’ work knows, he is an artist who opposes any narrative of straightforward recovery. Certainly, the subjects addressed on all three Perfume Genius albums—suicide, drug addiction, sexual abuse—demand a more complex understanding of restitution and therapy. While on “I Decline,” Hadreas notes an “angel just above the grid/ Open, smiling, reaching out,” he is quick to rebuke the symbolism of the image. Later on “Grid,” the angel has vanished altogether, and all that remains is “a diamond/ Swallowed and shit/ Then swallowed again.” It’s an arresting confluence of images, each swimming atop and negating the other, but it speaks to the larger questions of evolution the Hadreas asks with his music. While songs like “Queen” ride confident and throbbing guitar lines, others such as “I’m a Mother” disintegrate under their sound, trading in whimpers and rumbles as opposed to any traceable musical arc. In fact, the whole album seems to build and crumble and build over the course of its runtime, trading in a conscious self-subversion and sabotage that both encourages and frustrates any notion of closure. It’s a mature transfiguration of theme into form—especially for an album that could be dismissed as pop—and one that allows Too Bright to gradually reveal itself as it moves along, and then to deepen with multiple listens.

    On top of all of this, Too Bright is also absurdly beautiful, composed of 11 deeply assured songs that feed into each other texturally such that certain stretches seem to be made up of one long track. In passing, I’ve described Hadreas’ music as something like the lovechild of Youth Lagoon and Radiohead. However, that undersells the incontrovertible distinctiveness of what he has created with each of his three albums. I can think of no other artist who is able to maintain the devotion to honesty and growth that defines Perfume Genius’ discography, qualities that become all the more impressive when played out so thoroughly over the course of barely 33 minutes. Too Bright manages to feel both absolutely self-contained and blessedly incomplete, opening itself up on either end to the richness of Hadreas’ previous work and showing us what has allowed these first three records to mingle with and feed off each other so magnificently.

    If these albums were films, they’d be the sort that you’d want to marathon before the release of each successor. Even as I write that, the temptation to compare disparate art forms seems foolish and reductive. Still, it’s hard not to find something almost narrative or cinematic in Hadreas’ work. His music has an almost synesthesiac texture that bubbles within each and every record. The result is often painful and challenging, but always engrossing. If Too Bright doesn’t promise a balm to all of the wounds that Learning and Put Your Back N 2 It explored so ruthlessly, it gestures towards a sense of wholeness and closure that seems to preclude any scabbing. That’s a rare and wonderful destination.