"My name is Brittoni, I'm 22 years old, and I could not live without eating makeup," begins a testimony on an episode of TLC’s "My Strange Addiction." She continues, "You can kind of imagine it just coating your insides with whatever color you’re eating. It’s just like a craving of your favorite kind of candy bar." Consider, if you can, the feeling of those metallic and muted colors sliding down your esophagus, dripping a Pollockian masterpiece onto your stomach lining. The feeling might be queasy—and most likely dangerous for your health—but you’d look beautiful on the inside.
Queasy, vaguely illicit, and beautiful on the inside: This is a good way to describe Seth Bogart’s self-titled debut. After releasing three album as sweaty hedonist Hunx (two with His Punx, one by himself), Bogart has taken back his own name, trading the leather jacket for a hot pink suit and a sharply parted haircut. The fried garage pop and retro balladry of albums past has been swapped for a club-ready sound that plays like a fever dream set inside an episode of "Miami Vice": bright colors, buzzing synthesizers, chipmunked vocals, the smooth confidence of adults on the prowl for meaningful sex. Bogart nods at the trendiness of his genre change on "Eating Makeup," which was inspired by the TLC episode, where he enlists Kathleen Hanna to sing about her growing preoccupation with the titular subject. What begins as a lick or a curiosity turns into a full-blown obsession, and all of a sudden, you’re sprawled in the center of Sephora, covered in opened concealer. Eventually, Bogart concludes gleefully, "everybody’s eating makeup."
It sounds like an appealing fantasy, though much of the album concerns how such fantasies can ultimately turn hollow. "Hollywood Squares" has the energy of a cheerleader rally, but its bombast masks a more tender sentiment as Bogart sings about his fascination with a celebrity culture he recognizes as poisonous: "And I can’t believe that I could be this/ Desperate for a lick of something that doesn’t exist." Elsewhere, he sings about being in love with a phony ("Plastic!"), his fascination with someone who he only sees on the screen ("Smash the TV"), and his failure to fulfill someone’s needs ("Forgotten Fantazy"). The latter is built around a restrained synthesizer melody ripped from the waiting screen of some old Nintendo game, as Bogart, his voice no longer gleeful, considers how his actual self has been consumed by another’s idealized vision: "It’s hard for me to know what you need/ I’m your forgotten fantazy."
The tension between artifice and reality is what gives Seth Bogart most of its conceptual heft, but it obviously helps that the album is very fun to listen to. (The neon synth-pop of "Club With Me," which shines like a cocaine-dusted disco ball, is a highlight.) Not all of the guest singers are as prominent as Kathleen Hanna, but they’re no less successful. Chela’s confident vocal on "Flurt," which is about a tug-of-war with a romantic tease, brims with concealed sadness juxtaposed against the upbeat tempo. I thought about Pool, the new record by Porches, which similarly traded guitars for synthesizers on an album that pondered the worth of going out. The difference here is that Bogart is doing his thinking after going out. The greater depths follow the sparkle of immediate pleasure—a dynamic that reflects the real life process of getting delirious at the disco before contemplating in a more private moment what that was really all about.
The most affecting moments come when Bogart starts off in a quieter mode. "Lubed" rides a hypnotic synthesizer line over piano and melodic distortions as Bogart makes a sensuous offer for some good, consensual fun in the bedroom. The first time we saw Bogart, his greased-up crotch was smack dab in the middle of his album cover, but outsized eroticism (I want to fuck) and burning bedroom eyes (Do you want to fuck?) aren’t mutually exclusive. Then, there’s "Barely 21," the sugar-sweet duet with Rookie founder Tavi Gevinson whose premise—an inconvenient but genuine affair with someone who’s "barely 21"—is loaned an ironic wink by the fact that Gevinson is 19-years-old. But Gevinson’s voice is as pure as the driven snow, temporarily dispelling the real world context. "Cry, baby," they sing, over and over, a reminder that despite appearances, some things just hit you in the heart.
