Singer-songwriter Jack Tatum seeks tranquility amid the disorienting thrum of a chaotic world on Wild Nothing’s fourth album, Indigo. The band eschews the forays into shoegaze and ’60s psych-rock that marked 2016’s Life on Pause in favor of synth-pop and yacht rock that vividly evokes the lazy days of summer. Jaunty basslines, shimmering guitar, bright synth washes, and sultry sax seamlessly gel into soundscapes that are alternatingly meditative and kinetic. With the notable exception of the guitar crunch on “Canyon on Fire,” there’s not a discordant texture to be found on the album.
Indigo is a far cry from the lo-fi bedroom recordings of Wild Nothing’s 2010 debut, Gemini. This is the band’s most polished effort to date, but Tatum struggles to match the album’s sleek technical elements with meaningful lyrics, frequently leaning on platitudes. Propelled by pulsing bass and skittering drums and adorned with synth flourishes, “Letting Go” sonically captures the thrill that can come from overcoming burden, but Tatum can only define those obstacles in broad, clichéd lamentations about a “broken world” and wishing to be “happier.” More effective is the ethereal “Shallow Water,” in which Tatum, through rippling reverb, uses dreamlike imagery to evoke an atmosphere of serenity that mirrors the blissed-out music.
Thematically, Tatum occasionally relies on a nebulous notion of how romantic love has changed in the digital age. He languidly sings of “heartache 2.0” on “Wheel of Misfortune,” a melodramatic song that grasps at profundity through hyperbolic and simplistic proclamations like “everyone knows that love is worth the questions never answered.” And on “The Closest Thing to Living,” a brooding track punctuated with Italo-disco drums, Tatum describes a world glowing with the indigo light of smartphone screens, and bemoans social media leaving him feeling “together but alone” in this “age of detachment,” a well-worn sentiment about which Tatum doesn’t offer any new insights.
That’s not to say that Wild Nothing doesn’t demonstrate more nuanced perspectives here. “Partners in Motion” is one of the few tracks that stir up true tension, as its lovey-dovey chorus about the “beautiful devotion” between two partners takes on a more ominous hue as it gradually becomes apparent that the self-described “obsessive” narrator is voyeuristically coveting the lives of a happy couple. But these more complex ruminations are few and far between, with Tatum too often getting bogged down in generic binaries, from the fire and rain dichotomy on “Canyon on Fire” to a fickle romantic partner always “pulling me close” and “pushing me back” on “Oscillation.” Delivered with Tatum’s vocals so prominent in the mix, these trite lyrical moments blemish Indigo’s otherwise pristine musicality.
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