Work felt like work, so Optica-- the fourth LP from Sweden's Shout Out Louds-- takes things a little easier. Recorded over a year and a half and produced by the band (with an assist from Radio Dept. affiliate Johannes Berglund), Optica is warm, expansive, and swimming in strings. Judiciously paced, too: Clocking in just under an hour, there's not a hasty second to be found among these dozen tracks. The Shout Out Louds took their sweet time with Optica, and it shows: the production's richer, more inviting, their movements more deliberate. But the romantic desperation that carried this band's pre-Work output is hard to come by on Optica, an okay enough widescreen synth-pop record with some major urgency issues.
Matching the electroid strut of the Flaming Lips' "Fight Test" to any major key Cure single, the rousing, skywritten melody under opener "Sugar" is easy to get lost in. Current single "Illusions" follows, a glimmering New Order tribute destined to pad out dance night playlists in the months to come. Things start to slip around "Blue Ice", a swoony New Romantic puddle dripping with lousy puns ("Blue Ice" becomes "blue eyes" that "came out of the blue," which, well, yikes) and a limp, hushed-for-a-reason melody. Mercifully, Arcade Fire-y corker "14th of July" sweeps in to the blood going a bit, but it's only when Adam Olenius starts singing that you'll start seeing red. "Take me to the room where you grew up," he requests, before adding "I bet it's got a great view/ I bet no one loves you."
It's a strange moment, maybe Optica's strangest. And while it's not a great line on its own, the sheer abruptness of it all offers a brief but badly needed respite from the synth-dappled serenity that surrounds it. Optica's a pleasant enough record on the whole, but it suffers from a kind of excessive competence: at this point in the game, the Shout Out Louds are seemingly incapable of penning a genuinely lousy tune, but as with Work, they're having some trouble settling on a truly inspiring one. What Pitchfork's Marc Hogan wrote about Work-- "all innocuous midtempo thrum and vague yearning"-- seems every bit as applicable here; These songs tend to float along on sturdy but unspectacular melodies, agreeable enough not to send you across the room looking for the pause button but rarely so gripping you'll remember one song by the time the next one gets going.
The band's year-and-change in the studio wasn't for naught, and the mostly self-produced Optica proves the Shout Out Louds' worth behind the boards. Every surface on Optica shimmers, and every close listen turns up more spangles to dislodge from your earlobes. But Optica's detail-oriented sonics can't quite make up for some of its big picture deficiencies, imprecise emotions and melodies that feel rounded off at the edges to discourage friction. The Shout Out Louds deserve their propers for bringing a little more color back into their sound in the wake of Work's Dockers-clad drudgery. But, much like its predecessor, Optica's pervasive mildness doesn't give you much to latch onto.
