Psychedelia comes in many guises, and Post Animal wear just about all of them. The Chicago sextet’s debut, When I Think of You in a Castle, is a practical travelogue through the genre’s more melodic and explicitly rock-y incarnations, tempered with just the right amount of brawny power-pop. At times, they resemble the ’70s-radio dreams of ELO and Wings, or an alternate-universe Thin Lizzy that came up in Athens, Georgia’s storied Elephant 6 collective instead of the pubs of Dublin. The band’s previous EPs—Post Animal Perform the Most Curious Water Activities from 2015, and 2016’s The Garden Series—leaned hard on haze and fuzz, and while those elements are far from absent on When I Think of You in a Castle, there’s a new sense of clarity and realization. As far as first LPs go, it’s shockingly confident.
Among the members of Post Animal is actor Joe Keery, whom you might recognize from the depths of your Chromecast as “Stranger Things” mimbo Steve Harrington. The six musicians in the group collectively share writing credits for the album, and they frequently swap lead vocal duties, so Keery’s contributions wouldn’t necessarily stand out—except for the fact that his other gig almost prevented Post Animal from continuing at all. “We weren’t sure what the future of the band was going to look like,” drummer Wesley Toledo states in a one-sheet. “We didn’t know where we were all going, but we knew we wanted to make an album with all of us in the same room.”
Good thing, too: A self-produced effort recorded in a cabin by Michigan’s Paw Paw Lake, When I Think of You in a Castle at its best resembles six guys jostling for elbow room as they pile colorful, blocky riffs atop one another like an intense game of Jenga. “Heavy” is an adjective often applied to variants of psych-rock and pop, and Post Animal often sound like they weigh a thousand tons, breaking into doomy sludge in the middle of the dizzying “Gelatin Mode” and melding Toledo’s arrhythmia-inducing bass hits and Keery’s frantic vocals on “Dirtpicker” to create an endlessly building, ziggurat-like effect.
If those descriptors sound like they hew closely to the nerdy sonic calculus of prog rock, you’re not too far off. Mountain-scaling arpeggios and showy chord progressions are practically in the band’s DNA, and there’s a sense of old-fashioned skill emanating from When I Think of You in a Castle that is, at times, gloriously unfashionable compared to the current indie rock landscape. But focusing on Post Animal’s considerable chops also risks overlooking the band’s impressive skill for crafting memorable melodic baubles. Dalton Allison’s satisfying high register punctuates the turned-loose drum solos and stop-start breakdowns of “Tire Eyes,” and “Ralphie” opens up from a six-stringed air raid to reveal a sweet power-pop gem with interlocking vocal hooks crafted to raise your blood sugar levels.
Despite being a clear album standout, the panting horndog-isms of “Ralphie” also represent Post Animal’s true Achilles heel: They may have no trouble getting creative musically, but their lyrical content isn’t quite as inventive. The band recently admitted in a track-by-track breakdown that the lyrics of “Gelatin Mode” are essentially interchangeable placeholders, and Post Animal’s subject matter—generally falling into the two broad categories of lusting after women and expanding your mind—confirms the impression that words aren’t their focal point. This is, for now, fine; there’s a long legacy of psychedelic music where what’s being said is of far lesser concern than what’s being played. But the lyrical efforts from some of Post Animal’s clearest predecessors—MGMT’s saucer-eyed apocalyptic visions, the Magic Eye-like emotional anxiety of Tame Impala—highlight the fact that this band has nowhere to grow but up.
