Naming your group Teengirl Fantasy suggests a self-conscious interest in someone else's idea of joyful abandon. Or at least, it does if the group in question is a pair of male twentysomethings. Since they formed, Oberlin buddies Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi have treated hedonistic, crowd-moving dance music this way: as something colorful, captivating, and too delicate to handle roughly. The fragility of their music has helped make them interesting, but so far, it has also kept them from being great. Their second full-length, Tracer, is a step deeper into a fantasy Teengirl might call their own. But there remains a gap between fiddling creatively with the music you love and making music that succeeds as clearly on its own terms, and Weiss and Takahashi haven't quite closed it yet.
In some ways, their defining statement remains Weiss' slowing down of Mariah Carey's "Touch My Body" past the point of recognizability, a calling-card moment that heightened expectations for their debut, 7AM. That record never quite fought its way out of the middle-- the middle of the road, the middle of the dynamic range, the aesthetic midpoint between the drama of the records they loved and the remove they approached them from. The best song, "Cheaters", once again hitched its star to a super-heated vocal performance, the churchy Philly-soul grit of Love Committee's "Cheaters Never Win". On Tracer, they take another step away from the music of the past, bringing in a handful of guest vocalists, including Panda Bear, Kelela, and Laurel Halo, with mixed results.
Laurel Halo's voice is awfully close to a synth tone already, and it floats weightlessly around the synth programming on "Mist of Time". Panda Bear's voice fraternizes uncomfortably with the pistoning rubbery drum and mechanical Detroit-house atmosphere on "Pyjama". "EFX", featuring Kelela, doesnt work at all. The vocals are simply thin, and the song's disparate parts-- the meandering chorus melody, the tinny sixteenth-note hi-hats, the uncertain, shuddering rhythm of the synths, the syncopated finger pops-- just don't cohere. It isn't a shrewd recasting of a standard R&B song; it's simply an ineptly made example of one.
On the rest of the record, however, Weiss and Takahashi lay out their visions in purely instrumental terms, and the production is sumptuous and beautifully tactile. This is what Teengirl Fantasy do best: They craft immaculate headphones music, full of enveloping small details. The panning synth on "Orbit" hits like sunlight on a river, while the watery blub of the drums and the little whispers that strafe across the mix all suggest an environment alive with tiny sounds of life. "Vector Spray" is built on a beat that sounds like feet splashing in shallow water and then wraps perspective-bending synth prisms around it. "Eternal" surrounds a breath-caught heartbeat pulse with a firefly storm of soft lights.
On tracks like these, Teengirl build a world that feels very much their own, a place where industrial soot and grime mixes with blinding rainbow light. The music is both layered and weightless, misty and bright. If Tracer has significant replay value, it's for the parsing of the details of its light-filled surface, for the sounds themselves. During these moments, the music that inspired Weiss and Takahashi to start making music in the first place feels pleasantly remote.
