Sometimes you just gotta go straight to the elevator pitch: what if the xx came up on American Football instead of Aaliyah? Though his post-production methods put him within the scope of downtempo, monastic R&B, Joey Vannucchi uses the compositional tools of twinkly, technical emo—clean guitar figures criss-crossed in askew time signatures, hopscotching drum rhythms, hushed vocals piecing together desires for someone always out of the frame. It’s hard to tell where the meticulous mood-setting of one format begins and the other ends, but you’ve got 68 minutes on From Indian Lakes’ fourth LP to figure it out: this is Vannucchi’s sound and he doesn’t deviate much from it.
While “the first math rock make-out album” is certainly a novel concept, it’s no gimmick; the singular aesthetic here has been in development for the better part of a decade. The first biographical nugget often told of Vannucchi is that he grew up in isolation and without electricity on a 40-acre parcel of land near Yosemite National Park. There wasn’t much to do besides obsess over music and play drums in a church basement, so it makes sense that his first two self-recorded and self-released albums drew from formative listening staples like Radiohead, but also Death Cab for Cutie and quasi-Christian alternative acts like Copeland, As Tall as Lions, and Lydia that once filled the midsection on Bamboozle festival posters.
Vannucchi’s upbringing makes for a nice story, though From Indian Lakes’ trajectory should be quite familiar to rock fans this point: band from far outside a major media center, too introspective and ambitious to be pigeonholed in pop-punk, finds an audience alienated by both the juvenilia of Warped Tour and painful curation of cool that defined mainstream indie. This is basically how the emo revival happened, and by 2014’s Absent Sounds, From Indian Lakes had signed to Triple Crown, now the home of Into It. Over It., You Blew It!, Sorority Noise, and Foxing, bands representative of the current day’s more thoughtful and enlightened popular emo.
This trajectory has coincided with Vannucchi shearing off every conceivable marker of his alt-rock beginnings until there’s nothing left but the pretty stuff. The blushing fauna gracing the album cover has become a familiar sight in emo’s ongoing progressive, pastoral phase, but nothing has truly embodied humidified, aural verdancy like *Everything Feels Better Now. *Though Vannucchi’s arrangements are intricately crafted, every sound gets subjected to a unifying greenhouse effect, distorted guitars, vibraphones, panning effects and tremolo shudders all becoming soft, yielding textures drooping into each other.
If it’s dream-pop, the emphasis is exceedingly towards the former; though Vannucchi’s bashful, beatific hooks bring “Blank Tapes” and “Happy Machines” to tidal crests, nothing really peaks or crashes. The reverie is only broken up when Vannucchi tries to deliver a *message *and falls back on stock metaphors for the impotence of nostalgia (“Blank Tapes”), indignity of public performance (“It’s my soul you want and a cage for me”), inner demons (“The Monster”) and American dreams (“American Dreams”).
But if Vannucchi’s guileless lyricism can occasionally lapse into diaristic angst, it’s also responsible for the simple, lovelorn ache that defines Everything Feels Better Now and distances it from the burlier entrants in the scene’s soft parade, as well as the Bed, Bath and Body Works of Washed Out or Rhye which it superficially resembles at times. Vannucchi is unquestionably a mash note writer—“when you need to feel someone lying next to you, I can be the one” is a typical sentiment and one that would be cloying if the music didn’t back it up with such welcoming, plush ambience. “I think I’m ready to lose myself in your love,” Vannucchi coos. Fittingly, it takes him until the eleventh track to get to that point. It’s mood music for the hopeless romantic, overwhelmed by the desire to connect but pining for the confidence to make the first move.
