Dent May's songs really work in the context of his label, Animal Collective's Paw Tracks. He comes off as the inverse of lablemate Ariel Pink's narcotic AM kaleidoscopes: a button-up, FM-obsessive who just has his shit a little more together. In the context of a boutique label like Paw Tracks -- with Black Dice, Eric Copeland, and Excepter on the roster -- May is the palate cleanser, the fresh drink of sweet lemonade after a cocktail of Campari and motor oil. Maybe at Paw Tracks luncheons he’s the odd man out, where the other noiseniks are sharing an experimental demo tape recorded with a vintage arpeggiator in a large field, Dent May is pacing around humming a pop melody with his hands in his pockets, thinking about where he last had his keys.
Considering that Dent May obsesses over the banalities of love in his songs, that fantasy really isn’t a stretch. Last year’s LP Do Things saw him doing the kind of unremarkable things best suited for the notes in the margin in the book of summer-- breezy songs filled with platitudes about young love and the woes of paying rent. On Warm Blanket, May revisits many of the same themes that he did just over a year ago, only with fuller orchestrations, and a partial explanation for his love of the mundane. His debt to and admiration of Brian Wilson is more prominent than ever, sounding almost like he had Murray Wilson in the studio with him cracking the whip and tightening the harmonies to make each melody as sticky as possible. The problem is Dent May -- the one-man band who wrote, arranged, and performed the bulk of this album -- is not only still not doing things, but he’s not really saying things, either.
May’s main worry on Warm Blanket is this idea that he is living in the wrong era. The album’s thesis is presented in “Born Too Late”, where May cascades down a chorus singing “Born too late to tell you that I love you baby/ But I want you to know I been thinkin’ about you lately.” It’s a sweet tune, one of the best he’s ever written, and it sticks around longer that it has any right too. Similar is “Ready to Be Old”, where we get a hint of May’s malaise: “I think the future will feel much better than I feel now.” His dissatisfaction with the present informs his songwriting, born ceaselessly into the past with lyrics that could be anything from schoolyard love-notes to something that could've been crooned by Bing Crosby. Wit, irony, satire mostly elude May across the album-- instead there are 11 songs of bedroom-surf rock that are so bizarrely simple they become ingratiating.
Maybe that’s May’s goal: to shine a light on efficacy of simplicity in the face of the complexities of modern life. The syncopated way he sings the chorus of of “Summer Is Over” that borrows from the Beach Boys wholesale doesn’t require any subtext or cleverness. Maybe its May’s exhaustion with the layers of 21st century communication that pushes him to use colorless nouns and tropey turns of phrase to write songs, like "So let them hate us/ 'cause we're not haters" on "Let Them Talk". Whatever the case, his hooks get stuck in your head but his lyrics are thin and forgettable. If May’s prolific pace and knack for a hook continues into next year, he could afford to be a bit more May Schmay and a little less "Dent May Sings Of Mixed-Up Hearts".
