Aaron Maine’s music captures a balmy, suburban languor with its dreamy synths and plainspoken, often despairing lyrics. Throughout the evolution of his recording project Porches, Maine’s songwriting and bedroom-pop production have become looser and more instinctual, but his sullen, throaty vocals and anxious self-analysis has remained a steady constant.
Maine’s fifth album, All Day Gentle Hold, is his punchiest and most concise to date, striking a balance between the pop precision of 2016’s Pool and 2018’s The House and the unbridled, sometimes unwieldy creativity of 2020’s Ricky Music. And like many other albums produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, it conveys a desire for connection.
That longing spills over into self-destruction on “I Miss That,” where Maine admits, “I couldn’t believe what I had, so I threw it away,” before letting his impulsiveness get the better of him once again. “Take me for a ride and drive into a tree,” he pleads, tires screeching and metal crashing behind him. The song’s angst sets the tone for an unusually noisy Porches album, but Maine undergirds its garage-rock casualness with an obsessively repetitive chorus.
In fact, the three tracks that open the album—“Lately,” “I Miss That,” and “Okay”—all have highly repetitive hooks (the chorus of “Okay,” for instance, consists of the title sung 16 times). Maine fine-tuned this hypnotic technique on Ricky Music, and his use of it here is measured. Just when the album threatens to become monotonous, however, “Swimming Big” disrupts its structure with impassioned vocal harmonies, laughter, and distorted brass.
This keen attention to pacing is one of the album’s greatest strengths. When playground chants and bubblegrunge guitars reappear on “Grab the Phone,” they don’t feel redundant or recycled, but like unifying callbacks to the album’s opening tracks. Equally effective is Maine’s mostly deadpan delivery of lyrics about black holes, blood, and bodily trauma, offset by warm pop-rock guitars and lively drum loops.
On “Back3School,” the album’s most affecting song, Maine’s imagined lives intersect. In one he’s got a wife and kids, and in another he’s a child ready to return to class at the end of summer. Over somberly drooping synths, he sings, “I don’t know who you are, but I’m screaming your name,” his mind falling just short of filling the gaps left by loneliness.
Elsewhere on the album, Maine approaches this yearning more grimly, especially on “Grab the Phone”: “Don’t bite the hook/I just let it slide through my check,” he sings in a sprightly melody that recalls early Charly Bliss. Still, his desire is so intense that it gives his voice a hint of danger: “Grab the phone and get it down/I want to get it wrong.”
All Day Gentle Hold is rife with expressive touches that point to Maine’s growing confidence, and the feeling of access to his innermost thoughts accentuates the album’s tenderness. The slightly offbeat percussion of “Lately,” charming self-deprecation of “Swarovski,” and glitchy cryptic-ness of “Inasint” are spontaneous without sacrificing Maine’s careful pop craft. But maybe more importantly, elements such as these are transportive, underscoring Maine’s summery scenes of love and friendship with therapeutic results.
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