It feels almost like a novelty these days for a dude to write an album entirely about being extremely horny. Men don’t make music about sex the way they used to. We are far past the epoch of Serge Gainsbourg writing pop songs that involved Jane Birkin or Brigitte Bardot mimicking the sounds of orgasm. People have more or less collectively agreed that rendering women as pure sex objects in music doesn’t need to happen so much anymore. Greg Gonzalez, the frontman of the noir dream-pop band Cigarettes After Sex, must not have gotten the memo. He operates within a space of midcentury sexual anachronism. His second record, Cry, is a 41-minute dream about Penthouse pets and women in silken underthings, filtered through chiaroscuro and top-shelf whiskey. There is a universe where this raciness could conceivably offer a reprieve from indie rock’s occasional prudishness. Unfortunately, Gonzalez’s candor about his desire comes off as lifeless and borderline asinine.
This is clear from the first play of the record. The bleak textures, like those of the band’s debut, have been airlifted from the darkest corners of dream-pop music. There are notes of Violet Indiana and the Verve circa A Storm in Heaven, as well as more obvious tips of the hat to Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. “Kiss It Off Me,” the album’s second song, uses subterranean synth parts that are uncannily similar to the ones on the Twin Peaks soundtrack. The intrigue and Lynchian darkness pretty much stop once we meet the apple of Gonzalez’s eye, a protagonist as two-dimensional as a piece of paper peeling off a picnic table in a light breeze. “I could see you were walking slow/Drinking a Slurpee/In a peach baseball cap/Falling in my lap/You were so thirsty,” Gonzalez sings, with unearned wistfulness. He yearns to make her forget about “all of those rich fuckboys” she tends to date, and by the end of the song, she’s biting her lip and begging for it before she heads off to the gym in the morning. If there is anything romantic about this encounter, it is washed away by the song’s utter inability to deviate from overused ’90s pastiche—or, more importantly, to represent the woman in question as anything other than some chick who loves to work out and have sex.
Then there’s “Hentai,” a song that’s literally about anime porn. Specifically, about a hentai video he described to his paramour the first time they “made love,” about “a girl who as soon as she made you come/Could show you the future and tell you your fortune.” The scene setting could almost be funny, but there’s scant irony in Gonzalez’s delivery. The sound of the song is as delicate as an antique plate gathering dust on a shelf: High notes on electric guitars are languidly plucked, and the bassline is a slow IV drip that gives you goosebumps. Then there’s the question of Gonzalez’s voice, a truly lovely and androgynous tenor that’s wasted on lines like these. You could lose yourself in the sound, if losing yourself is akin to collapsing on an overly plush bed. “Pure” is an equally banal and pornographic sketch of a song. Here, Gonzalez’s woman wears a white bodysuit and has wet hair. Long story short, she goes down on him, and then they go stare out the window but all he can think about is how he got to see her naked. It’s the album’s closer, but it’s likely to leave you feeling nothing, other than perhaps blunted anger.
Cry doesn’t evoke much in the name of passion. Unless, of course, passion is the same thing as wafting through depression, and sex is the means to fill that void. There is nothing wry about the way Gonzalez writes about sex. The album has almost zero sense of humor and is deadly serious in its execution. It’s important to write about sex on one’s own terms, and there are plenty of compelling ways to explore sexuality in song. The problem here is that the narrative of this record is essentially one giant, dull, and gross fantasy plucked from adolescent male puberty. It presents a vision of sex that comes from surfing Pornhub after school before your parents get home from work, and from looking at pictures of minimally clad Instagram influencers while waiting in line to get a flu shot. Gonzalez’s attempt to be honest about his experiences is far removed from the reality of what it is like to be sexually vulnerable in front of another person. Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. “Hey sexy, you up?” the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.
Buy: Rough Trade
