Los Angeles songwriter Alex Izenberg describes his debut album as the culmination of five years of writing and recording, which is a long time for a record that feels like the product of a few casual studio sessions. A modernist spin on the ’70s singer-songwriter album, grounded in the same evergreen themes of longing and heartache, Harlequin often seems torn between its ambition and its nonchalance. At times Izenberg shows flashes of Van Dyke Parks’ compositional bravado, but just as often he handicaps himself with Dollar Store chamber-pop accompaniments. He can’t commit to going big, but he doesn’t want to go too small, either.
Mostly, it seems, Harlequin just wants to sound different, and on that front it succeeds. Following in the freak-folk tradition, it never goes too long without an idiosyncrasy: train horns, found sounds, long pauses, blank spaces, and other apparent studio mistakes that are almost certainly more deliberate than they pretend to be. The tropes themselves aren’t especially new, but the way they’re all shuffled together is, and Izenberg is confident enough in the originality of his final product that he directly credits his influences. Instead of downplaying his debt to Grizzly Bear on waltzier pieces like “Archer” and “Changes,” Izenberg leans into it, adopting Daniel Rossen’s top hat-doffing swoon as a kind of homage.
Elsewhere, Lou Reed gets a nod on the choppy cabaret number “To Move on” when Izenberg borrows his “Rock & Roll” phrasing to describe dancing to that “fine, fine music,” although it’s Reed’s Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale who looms even larger over the record. Austere violas and cellos lend an undercurrent of doom to a series of stormy, impressionistic pieces like “Libra” and “The Farm,” which tease the full-scale orchestral album Izenberg might have made instead.
Listening to Harlequin, it’s hard not to wonder if the record would have been better off if Izenberg had gone all in on those arrangements, since the album always stops just short of genuinely wowing. Where Parks, Rossen, and Cage never disguise how much effort they’ve spent meticulously piecing their components into intricate works, Izenberg would rather give the appearance that he just poured a jigsaw puzzle box onto the table and accepted the patterns that formed. That approach sometimes scans as insecurity: Harlequin often feels like a pretentious album afraid of being called pretentious.
The record’s best numbers are those rare ones when the adornments take a back seat to the songs themselves. On the early highlight “Grace,” Izenberg laments losing himself in a misguided crush, and lands one of the better forehead-slap lyrics this side of Rivers Cuomo’s “I’m dumb, she’s a lesbian”: “Darkness had taken over me,” he sings, “Once I’d seen her engagement ring.” And on “Changes,” his struggles as both a romantic and a songwriter converge when he confesses, “It’s getting real hard to talk about her to anyone.” The album could use a few more moments like that, lines where Izenberg comes across like the kind of relatable guy you might want to trade tales of heartbreak with over a beer. Yet for a record so guarded, it’s almost always personable—even its most difficult songs, like the avant sound collage “A Bird Came Down,” have a gracious, likable quality (it helps that he keeps them short). Harlequin is an odd album with perplexing priorities and a conflicted sense of scale, but just enough sweetness and heart to make you want to give it the benefit of the doubt anyway.
