Aaron Lee Tasjan has taken a lengthy, crooked road toward the profound musical and personal self-realization that he comes to on his fourth album, Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! After dropping out of college, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter spent years crisscrossing the country, playing in a few short-lived bands, spending time as a plug-in sideman for big-time veteran acts, and rubbing elbows with rock royalty. The album seems inexorably tied to lessons from his past—the creative reward of a long, strange trip.
This is Tasjan’s third album for venerable Americana label New West, but it’s the first on which he’s staked out a fully distinctive and fleshed-out identity for himself. His prior work was ripe with humor and a strong sense of melody, but it was limited by the kind of retrograde honky-tonk and classic-rock aping that one might expect from someone who played guitar for the latter-day New York Dolls. Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! is no less indebted to previous eras, with plenty of nods to ’60s psych-rock and ’70s power pop. But those influences are passed through a bright, cosmic filter, resulting in a warm and luxurious wall of sound that’s as futurist as it is retro. With acoustic guitars and astral synths humming alongside Tasjan’s silky voice, there’s a timeless quality to the album that elevates its best songs from merely great to sublime.
Tasjan! Tasjan! Tasjan! opens with an invigorating trio of tracks, including “Sunday Women,” which boasts waves of sun-bathed ’60s-style harmonies and introduces the first of the album’s fantastic, heavily treated guitar solos. Elsewhere, “Computer of Love” is a near-perfect power-pop song, with its playfully undulating piano-and-guitar riff, maddeningly catchy chorus, and lyrics about whiling away time in a video game. And Tasjan reaches an emotional crescendo on “Up All Night,” which recalls the classic anthems on Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever.
Tasjan doesn’t quite sustain that level of hook-filled euphoria across the entirety of the album, but he manages to enhance the comparatively second-tier melodies with endearingly personal writing. At times, his lyrical approach can be summed up by the title of one of the album’s songs, “Don’t Overthink It,” on which he rattles off a series of obvious rhymes like “twice” with “vice” and “done” with “gun,” though on tracks as well-constructed as this one, it’s the cadence more than the content that matters. “Cartoon Music” consists primarily of Tasjan repeating a sophomorically angsty chorus—“Cartoon music for plastic people/They don’t know how to feel”—seemingly ad infinitum, but when he writes about matters closer to the heart, like his own sexuality, his direct style is disarming and relatable. “Broke up with my boyfriend/To go out with my girlfriend/‘Cause love is like/Love is like/Love is like that,” Tasjan sings on “Up All Night,” adding to the song’s sweeping sense of catharsis with a line that casually alludes to something intimate from his past while blithely summarizing how his fellow millennials have helped redefine how the world sees sexual identity.
To that point, the album’s emotional centerpiece is “Feminine Walk,” a strutting psych-country song that amounts to a three-and-a-half-minute memoir about Tasjan’s career and queerness, among other things. The lyrics are endearing in their quirky honesty (he quips of Sean Parker, an ex’s ex: “I think he started Spotify”). But backed by yet another sumptuous sonic tapestry—including finger-picked guitar and spacey sound effects—they sound like nothing less than Tasjan finally figuring out exactly who he is.
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