Review Summary: another Lights album
In the time since Lights released her 2017 album
Skin&Earth with an accompanying graphic novel, written and illustrated entirely by her, she decided to step away from larger projects in favor of less intense endeavors. In the few years that followed, she collaborated with many different EDM producers to release a plethora of singles and EPs, as well as creating the formerly-anonymous "gothbounce" project Lun, and releasing a chillwave mixtape on her Bandcamp profile. With all of the time she spent dipping her toes into other styles of music, I was left wondering if Lights' next proper album would see any sort of drastic change from her tried-and-true brand of electropop. It turns out that my worries were for not, because
PEP is very much a return to form for Lights; and for better or for worse, depending on if one is a fan of her previous albums or not, she has essentially picked up where she left off on
Skin&Earth.
If one has never heard any of Lights' music before, the basic description that fits what she has been doing since her first album
The Listening is that she sings cute songs over self-produced electronic beats. There is usually at least one over-arching theme or distinction preventing critics from claiming that she has been making the same album over and over again, and for
PEP, I would say that the goal was, as the title implies, to invoke feelings of liveliness and spirit. I believe that overall she succeeded, because
PEP contains some of her most fun and lighthearted songs to date; but this self-contained pep rally is sandwiched between an opening track and two final songs which are gloomy, and openly express feelings of self-doubt. If I were to take a swing at why Lights formatted
PEP in this way, I would guess that she was trying to convey that her feelings of contentment and cheerfulness always eventually end up being pervaded by stress and sorrow, which is a true and relatable cycle of human emotion.
There is one reoccurring topic on
PEP that begs mentioning, which is money. The concept of money plays a key role in three songs:
Money in the Bag, which narrates a store or bank robbery from the perspective of what I imagine as Lights herself in a cowgirl getup;
Rent, which uses money metaphorically as a means for Lights to "evict" someone who has been on her mind (If you wanna to live in my head, you gotta pay the expenses / and honey, you can't afford what the rent is), and
Easy Money, which tells the story of a relationship where the girl is the one with the money, and insists that the boy doesn't have to worry about spending any of his own, as long as he spends his time with her. I would imagine that Lights, who has been able to make a career as a musician, is not strapped for cash; however, money was clearly in the forefront of her mind during the creation of this album. If I were to take a guess, with the lyrics to
Easy Money as my main source of evidence, I would say that Lights' husband, Beau Bokan of the once-popular-but-basically-dead-at-this-point metalcore band Blessthefall, has probably not been reeling in the dough like he used to.
After getting my hands on a trade paperback version of Lights'
Skin&Earth comic roughly a year after the release of its eponymous album, I hoped that Lights would simply release
Skin&Earth 2 next, with the ending of the comic insinuating that there may be more to come, and with the album itself being my second favorite of hers after her debut. But now that
PEP has been released, I'm glad that that didn't end up being the case.
PEP is everything one would expect it to be from reading the title and seeing the bright, primary-colored art – which is a fun, quirky, and uplifting album. Lights needed another one of these in her discography, because the playfulness with which she began her career with on
The Listening had since started to wane in favor of more serious topics. I think fun is always going to be the common denominator for all of Lights' music past and future, and I'm glad that she decided to embrace it once more here.
