Minutes into his second album as Turtlenecked in as many years, Harrison Smith puts his audience on notice: “Reality TV!/I’m not here to make friends!” Do not misinterpret this as Smith saying that he doesn’t care what you think about him or his scrappy indie rock project. At 20 years old, Smith has come of age at a time where it’s completely normal to use every moment as an opportunity to publicly manipulate your personality. “I don’t need no goddamn life/When I’ve got 100 likes” isn’t an original sentiment, but like every lyric on Vulture, it’s striving for the validation of any response, whether it’s smashing that like, RT, or the mute button. While Smith is capable of penning witty, voice-of-a-generation quotables, he’s just as enamored with Tumblr snark. It’s as if Vulture was put on earth at this very moment for people who just can’t bring themselves to pick sides in the very particular Car Seat Headrest/Ricky Eat Acid beef.
In fact, Smith’s entire M.O. is playing both sides—it’s unclear whether he’s mocking the actions of his peers, the Twitter and scene politics that dictate those actions, or just mocking those who do the mocking. That’s where Vulture’s problems start. In its very first lines, Smith shouts and shudders like Ian Curtis resurrected as a woke male feminist: “Someone tell these boys that I’m a feminist!/Someone tell these girls that I’m effeminate!” This is a song called “Boys Club,” and one would assume he’s presenting himself as an outspoken ally. But his heel turn happens less than two minutes into Vulture: The most genuine emotion of “Boys Club” is an all-consuming cynicism rather than indignation for the patriarchal power structure. Even if Smith calls his scene a “pale indie bro trash pile,” he then boasts that he’s going to be the king of that hill.
Vulture does occasionally back up that bluster, particularly when it’s perfumed by the beery piss and vinegar of Archers of Loaf circa Vee Vee on “Pangloss.” Yet for the most part, even though Turtlenecked’s verbal dialect is very 2017, the sound is mostly 2006-style blog-rock. Divorced from its unfortunate historical baggage, there was something to that style, which bridged the gap between the early 2000s post-punk revival and the Urban Outfitters takeover of the late 2000s. And these tics—jittery vocals, fractured rhythms, oddly shaped song structures—lend themselves well to Smith’s antic mind.
But when the choruses aren’t there, Vulture recalls those “Simpsons” Hullabalooza punks, who couldn’t even tell if they were being sarcastic anymore. “Human Veal” muddles the neurotic neediness of Xiu Xiu, Drake, and Taking Back Sunday into a toxic Long Island cocktail of emo self-awareness: “I’ve said LOL in every sentence/I want to show I meant it as a self-aware, half-ironic deprecating empty vessel for the remnants of my heart.” As someone who’s absorbed the near entirety of Saddle Creek’s output, I’ll admit this is the kind of thing that can feel revelatory and even empowering to hear within the context of a snappy indie rock song rather than an inner monologue.
Other times, this kind of mental jousting is just as exhausting to hear as it is to experience. On “Meeting You in the Hospital,” Smith boasts that he wants a romance like one from a movie or a novel, not some “patriarchal white male bullshit” or “pixie dream to save my life.” The effect of this lyric is entirely predicated on listener projection. If you assume Smith realizes all four things are basically the same—and that’s a big assumption—then it’s a clever lyric. If not, it’s just as insufferable as anyone else trying their damnedest to sound virtuous. Vulture occasionally hints at what Smith could accomplish as a writer if his scope matched his ambition. But for now, it’s a lesson that if you keep your head up your ass long enough, of course the world looks like it’s full of shit.
