Like many frustrated twentysomethings, Madeline Link fled the city and moved back in with her parents in early 2020. Enduring lockdown in the Ottawa suburbs where she grew up, she spent that torturous April writing and recording songs nonstop to ward off the anxiety. A year later, the arrival of PACKS’ full-length debut, the terse, 24-minute Take the Cake, solidified her talent.
A few years later, Link’s solo project, PACKS, has grown into a four-piece band, and she still seems to be riding that prolific wave. Inspired by the warped popcraft of Micachu and the Shapes and the voluminous output of Guided by Voices, Link squeezes out lazily hooky, lo-fi bangers as likely to draw lyrical inspiration from 19th-century literary arcana as from her personal life. She works fast and favors crude, brittle guitar tones that repel virtuosity; “I’m not a perfectionist,” Link told NME. Melt the Honey, an unshowily eclectic record warmed by the glow of new love, is the group’s third and strongest album since signing to Fire Talk in 2021.
Self-recorded with minimal equipment in an eccentric communal house near Xalapa, Mexico, the album buzzes with the spirit of a weirdo songwriter carving out a creative oasis. Songs vibrate with ideas, opening with snatches of band chatter (“HFCS”) and wildlife clamor (“Missy,” a bilingual ode to a stray cat hanging around the premises). Yet Link, who fell in love shortly before making this album, injects these scuzzy creations with a certain sweetness. With its sprightly organ and pleasantly dazed melody, “Honey” milks the confusing euphoria of a new relationship that feels like “seriously what I wanted all this time.” The titular refrain—“Come on, baby/Melt the honey,” Link croons suggestively—refers to the actual honey Link ate while living with her partner in a Chilean beach town. “HFCS,” inspired by high-fructose corn syrup, is a garage-pop sugar rush, while the languid, delicately layered “Take Care” seems to be about treating a partner with more tenderness than you can extend to yourself.
PACKS’ best songs deliver indelible hooks with the nonchalance of a slacker who couldn’t care less. It’s there in the downtuned psychedelia of “Trippin,” which evokes the lethargic haze of Mellow Gold-era Beck, and in the way Link exaggerates the coarse, sloppy qualities of her voice in that charmingly ’90s way on “Pearly Whites.” It’s also there in the way Link likes to repeat vocal refrains until they sound like nonsense syllables: “Fucked up, now you gotta restart/Gotta restart/Gotta restart,” she taunts on “Paige Machine.” The song refers to the fascinating saga of the Paige Compositor, a failed 1800s printing device whose creator, James W. Paige, received financial backing from Mark Twain but doomed his invention with an overcomplicated design and obsessive perfectionism. For PACKS, this seems to be a cautionary tale and guiding philosophy: overthink things and you risk winding up creatively obsolete.
