Review Summary: The same old wisdom with the same result.
After making a career out of interrogating the division between faith and morality, in both a religious and interpersonal context, multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter David Bazan has steadfastly committed to directing future inquiries upon himself. Reforming a live band under the Pedro The Lion name, the 2019 “comeback record”
Phoenix was an autobiographical recount of Bazan’s childhood years living in the city bearing the album’s name, filled with wistful, naive conceptions of material progress through the lens of a grown adult who can now see his past in all its complexity. Its spacious arrangements called to mind the area’s vast expanse of desert sky and unrelenting dry heat, juxtaposed against personal aloofness and an urge to see more of the world, both geographically and figuratively.
Bazan would soon get what he wished for; as it turns out,
Phoenix was just the start of a five-act series of albums detailing places where the musician grew up and the memories he continues to lend significance to from each spot once called home. Upon leaving the Valley of the Sun, a moving van would carry him and his increasingly alienating family west to Lake Havasu City, Arizona, a locale of then just about 20,000 residents, and even younger than a still very young Bazan. This was before the “city” became a Spring Break destination for the Southwest; its biggest contemporaneous attraction was a rebuilding of London Bridge, which is to say—a gimmick—a resort town which hadn’t actually entered anything that could be considered its “prime” for the single year Bazan lived there.
If David’s reckoning with vacuousness started with the events detailed on
Phoenix’s “Model Homes” and “Circle K,” it’s doubled down on throughout
Havasu to the point it becomes the album’s defining trait. What better year to navigate aimlessness, shyness, and uproot expectations hoisted upon you than a year where you’re the “new kid” entering public school in 7th grade, right? It’s easy to empathize with this awkward tween (a redundant phrase if ever there was one), and even easier to play armchair psychologist for him, tracing seemingly shallow events to the lasting behavioral impulses they triggered: a growing gap between Bazan and his father over details as trivial as what school band instrument to play in “First Drum Set,” defaulting to caloric intake on a stood-up date in “Stranger,” or on that same track, acknowledging “
loneliness conditioned you to think / that it’s virtuous to suffer quietly.”
Suffer quietly Bazan does here, and while his tales aren't all gloomy, onset-pubescent melodrama, those adjectives admittedly do define a good chunk of the lyrical content on this record and amorphously blur into its musical palette of choice as well. Pedro The Lion have long since “found their sound” within the realm of neatly-arranged guitar-driven indie rock, and neither
Phoenix nor
Havasu radically depart from that safe spot. That said, this take on the style notably daydreams in comparison to its predecessor, not in timbre or tempo so much as structure, with select verses starting to feel like thematic overkill and musical tedium by record’s end. The hits—insofar as anything on
Havasu could be considered a “hit”—are at least evenly distributed; “Don’t Wanna Move” and “Too Much” form an immersive opening duo, the album’s middle arc manages a potent consistency, and closer “Lost Myself” mesmerizingly ushers in the story’s next chapter where the family prepares to head further west to Santa Cruz. Amid it all, “Old Wisdom” seems positioned to be this chapter’s defining contribution to the greater Bazan catalogue, a short and sorrowful diagnosis on how evangelical settings stifle and gag inquisitiveness through intimidation. “
Kids in turmoil thinking it’s their fault / with their souls wide open to authority / ‘till they’ve traded everything for a peace with no peace.” Like…
f u c k, dude.
It's fitting that as Bazan struggles to coalesce growing impatience with his ability to take action on
Havasu, the record itself feels tonally bogged down and passive. Pedro The Lion’s lyrics remain their primary draw, but rarely before has the musicality felt so strictly environmental as it does here. The question becomes this; is that a bug or a feature? I’d argue every dreary arpeggio, every lumbering bass riff, every gutting one-liner and every throwaway detail accumulate into a sum greater than their parts and moreover justify
Havasu as a low-balled success, if not as a standalone work, then certainly as an elongated interlude for its parent series. On the other hand, evoking disappointment through a monotonous haze of lethargy can only float for so long—if anything’s clear by where
Havasu leaves patient listeners, it’s that the in-narrative Bazan has a good deal more growing up to do, and whatever the subsequent additions to this project end up covering, keeping
Havasu’s one-note inclinations an attribute exclusive to this arc would bode better for it and its follow-ups’ long-term reputation. ‘Till then, it’s a damn good thing the storytelling is as thorough as it is—even if this level of thoughtfulness is to be expected from a band who seems incapable of letting fans of their written word down.
