The turnover rate for pop re-appropriation is accelerating. We're barely at the backend of the last 1980s revival, kickstarted around the time the Rapture arrived in New York City and channeled the dormant influence of some of the city's musical forebears (Liquid Liquid, ESG, Tom Tom Club) on their now-seminal "House of Jealous Lovers" single. Over 20 years passed between Liquid Liquid's debut EP for 99 Records and the release of that Rapture single on DFA in 2002. Now, a decade later, Brooklyn-based five-piece Friends have sprung from the city's DIY scene, carrying a sound carved from the same touchstones that inspired the dance-punk movement. There are times when this debut covers itself in other decorative markings, but it primarily feeds off a strand of New York's past that's perilously close to being bled dry.
Initially, it felt like Friends could batter such concerns into the ground through the sheer force of personality of the band's singer, Samantha Urbani. The 2011 single "I'm His Girl" was a hook-laden, "Buffalo Stance"-style calling card, based around a cyclical lyric offering a defiantly female take on open relationships. When it appears on this record, it leaps out as Friends' defining moment, a chance for them to rise above the low-bar scene they're a part of to connect with a wider audience. As such, "I'm His Girl" was reasonably successful, although the drop-off between that song and the rest of Manifest! is sizeable. There's a palpable sense that this is a band struggling to define itself, apparently strangled by the too-cool reference points they seem hell-bent on shoehorning into their songs. It's sloppily played-- perhaps deliberately so-- and Urbani takes more of a back seat, apparently content to trade in snatched phrases that sound good but offer little depth.
In a sense, Manifest! is the logical endgame that occurs when a set of influences end up being thoroughly drained of their life force. When Friends dig into the percussion-heavy "Sorry" it comes out of the wash as the bloodless cousin to Liquid Liquid's similarly constructed "Optimo". The latter contains a valuable lesson: If you're going to strip songs down to rudimentary elements, where there's not much going on other than bass, percussion, and vocals, those things need to be doing something really inspired for it to work. Here, everything feels too calculated to reach a point of true inspiration. When Friends attempt to assimilate 70s funk influences on the leaden "Mind Control", it feels like they're over-thinking the idea of having a good time instead of truly getting lost in the moment.
Friends' slavish adherence to hip makes the "party" songs here particularly trying, ultimately severing them of the looseness they need to work and actually flipping their studied-cool façade on its head. The sense of deliberation in the ESG-referencing "Home" and the hapless Chic-lite groove of "Va Fan Gör Du" makes it feel like someone's dad just entered the room, bathed in bad cologne, desperately trying to get everyone on their feet. Elsewhere, Manifest! heads off in cynical pursuit of eclecticism, becoming a simple piece of tasteful indie box-ticking devoid of much character or life of its own. So we get the ghostly Zola Jesus electronics of "A Light", Urbani channeling Karen O on "Ruins", and a Cocteau Twins pastiche on "Stay Dreaming". Genre hopping is fine if you've got definable traits as a band to tie everything together, but Friends are simply wandering through their record collections, either unwilling or unable to assert themselves amid all the second-guessing.
That reticence is the primary failing of Manifest!, causing it to come off as a curiously empty experience. "I'm His Girl" was derivative, but it possessed a memorable vocal line and a catchy melody to latch onto. The bulk of this album is curiously devoid of these qualities, ending up as a surface-level skim across a set of styles extracted from perennially fashionable artists. Friends try really hard to make sure their influences are all immaculately selected, but they don't try hard enough to get to the crux of what made that music work so well in the first place. There's a lack of thought and care, a feeling that this band is still figuring out what it wants to be while not treading on too many toes in the process. "I'm His Girl" gave Friends a ticket out of the ever-decreasing circles of the Brooklyn indie scene, but Manifest! suggests they're short of ideas on how to take the next step.
