Review Summary: Rain, rain, go away
Misery loves company. It’s a saying that bands and artists have built entire careers around; Elliot Smith, Nick Cave, The National, The Smiths along with countless others have gained success through their perennially miserable music. Misery just seems to be more magnetic a force than happiness, listeners are drawn to pain and suffering believing it to hold some truth and sincerity. “Happy” music meanwhile often feels slightly false or worse, smug. Perhaps that’s why so many pop bands have zero staying power; happiness is a hard sell.
Indie-pop band Passion Pit make happy sounding music but their not-so-secret gift has always been their ability to juxtapose bouncy synthesizers and ostensibly upbeat songs with unexpectedly pessimistic lyrics. The revelation that Michael Angelakos, the man behind the Passion Pit moniker, suffers from bipolar disorder should, in hindsight, not have been all that surprising. The band has always felt at odds with itself; the light of the sugary sweet music battling the dark of Angelakos’ cynical lyrics has been a constant feature on previous albums.
New album Kindred arrives following Angelakos becoming a husband and stating that he’s in a better mental space than ever. That positivity can be heard throughout the whole album, this is Passion Pit’s most optimistic album yet. Given that the band’s more melancholic elements have been one of their distinguishing traits, an optimistic Passion Pit album could sound like cause for concern. As it turns out, it should be.
Kindred isn’t a bad album necessarily, it’s more a disappointingly generic one. The album is littered with songs like “All I Want” and “Until We Can’t (Let’s Go)” that sound tremendously fun without ever actually being all that fun or immersive. The album suffers from a feeling of manufactured euphoria which brands it somewhat soulless; huge, catchy choruses appear on most songs but never truly ignite the way they did on singles like “Take a Walk” from previous albums. “Five Foot Ten (I)” and its companion piece “Ten Feet Tall (II)” are particularly egregious examples with the former featuring a limp hook and the latter is simply their worst song to date with Angelakos employing auto-tune that scrambles his vocals completely. The main issue is that for long stretches of Kindred Passion Pit have settled into another faceless pop band, indistinguishable from countless others.
The album does shine in a few places though. Opener Lifted Up (1985) is quintessential Passion Pit and is the only honest to god joyous moment on here with trademark pulsing synths and ominous sounding lines like "all of the clouds are combining" before exploding into an unexpectedly defiant chorus. The other few highlights of Kindred arrive when the album slows down and moves away from festival ready woah-oh assisted choruses; “When the Sky Hangs” is a slinky funk number whose “I get caught up in your heartstrings” hook is one of the sweetest moments on the album. Elsewhere “Looks Like Rain” sounds like Vampire Weekend mixed with a certain nursery rhyme naivety as “Rain, Rain, Go Away” is repurposed to suggest that new beginnings can accompany the falling rain; a cleansing of one’s own life and the exorcism of past demons possibly. “Dancing on the Grave” similarly deals with escaping from a troubled past. It’s also as well as being as close to minimal as Passion Pit will likely get with Angelakos’s falsetto rightfully taking centre stage.
Despite a few highlights the majority of Kindred feels ideally suited for summer festivals or tailor made to help sell mobile phones or something simlilar; it’s a sugar rush of sickly sweet bubblegum pop that unfortunately lacks any real heart or any tangible emotion. Obviously it’s a pleasure to hear Angelakos so triumphantly optimistic but Passion Pit always felt like a band more comfortable in misery’s company than anywhere else.
