A friend recently volunteered a capsule review of Papercuts' new album, You Can Have What You Want: "Catchy, but it'd be better if it wasn't so... muted. It's like the guy's singing through the wall." On one level, my friend's right. Jason Quever's one-man (plus guests) band makes blurred-edge music with damp organs, milky guitars, reverbed vocals, and sticky, half-familiar melodies seemingly snatched from some collective unconscious. And the album's opening couplet, "Once we walked in the sunlight/ Three years ago this July 4th", sums up Papercuts' temperamental pitch with tweet-like brevity. Their 2007 LP was titled Can't Go Back, but as a songwriter Quever can't help but indulge nostalgia, including its bitter constituents, regret and remorse.
Papercuts, however, aren't agoraphobic shut-ins exorcising romantic demons and venting life's inequities. A backward-- and inward—looking predilection actually serves the band artistically. Quever crafts his aesthetic from the raw materials of Zombies, Velvet Underground, and Galaxie 500 appreciation, Phil Spector worship, and an indie rock gospel that equates modest ambitions with really, really meaning it. And the Bay Area singer-songwriter has buffed this sound to a rose-colored finish playing in and touring with 60s-rock fetishists Vetiver and pop deconstructionists Beach House and Grizzly Bear-- folks who consider musicological context. So a shivering dirge like "Jet Plane" or the spacey ether-float of "A Peculiar Hallelujah" don't seem unduly muted. They're simply well-crafted examples of a certain introspective, highly melodic pop tradition.
Although YCHWYW doesn't offer a song as memorable as Can't Go Back's superb "John Brown", the tracklist's reasonably solid. First single "Future Primitive" is cool and minimal, pitting pulsed bass, throbbing toms, and biscuit-crisp snare hits and tambourines against Quaver's high, hazy croon. In the few moments before his voice enters the analog mix, you could almost imagine a smart-suited Smokey Robinson stepping up to the mic. Hypotensive organ droning opener "Once We Walked in the Sunlight" and a few other stretches drag, but punchier tracks like "A Dictator's Lament", with its infectious Paisley Underground chorus, and "The Void", which flips its slow-creeping intro for a psychedelic, honey-harmonied outro, redeem the record's narcoleptic drifts.
But then, warm bath and afternoon nap pop (or, as the "Future Primitive" video intimates, tunes for lone, swaddled journeys across post-apocalyptic landscapes), is what fans have come to expect from-- and love about-- Papercuts. If these songs are low-voltage wires that hum, buzz, whir, purr but rarely jolt, they yield just enough electricity to light the way forward.
