Since departing Vampire Weekend, Rostam Batmanglij has made a name for himself as a go-to pop producer, adding idiosyncratic flair to the work of HAIM, Clairo, and Carly Rae Jepsen. But his stylistic stamp has often flowed better when applied to others’ output than his own. Although his last two solo releases, 2017’s Half-Light and 2021’s Changephobia, each had their standout moments of splendor, they’ve generally felt more like well-crafted aesthetic exercises than real albums to mull over. With each record, Rostam has grown creatively, synthesizing the elegant string arrangements and kinetic drum patterns that fueled Vampire Weekend’s best stuff, folding in touches of Auto-Tune and Middle Eastern influence while keeping his lyrics as elliptical and hushed as his vocals.
This modesty makes sense, given Rostam’s more behind-the-scenes role in Vampire Weekend and collaborating with other musicians. But on American Stories, his third and latest solo project, he attempts to branch out of his comfort zone a little more by mixing the personal with the political, using the images, symbols, and myths of American culture to examine issues of otherness, freedom, and the stories we internalize about ourselves. He demonstrates those themes most effectively through the album’s sonic design, flexing his signature jangly guitar riffs and cascading piano notes while supplanting his usual electronic textures with a warmer Americana folk/country-pop palette.
Despite the nice change in pace and presentation and the specificity of its scope, however, American Stories is ultimately a bit too lightweight for its thematic meditations to strike a wholly satisfying chord. In keeping with the metaphor of its title, it plays like a series of intermittently compelling chapters in a narrative that feels incomplete. The supposed exploration of Rostam’s Iranian-American identity is, for instance, curiously abstract and vague, transmuted mainly through the traces of microtonal saz melodies that surge throughout the production but are only fleetingly interrogated into the songwriting.
In fact, American Stories seems more focused on the fickle nature of romance than identity, with Rostam vacillating between finding joy in newfound love, gratitude for past relationships, and peace in their dissolution. That focus makes the album’s initial intention somewhat misleading and muddled, but the music admittedly gets solid emotional and sonic mileage out of these ideas, especially on tracks where Rostam’s rich, multilayered instrumentation does some impressive heavy lifting for the surface-level subject matter.
On the very pretty opener “Like a Spark,” Rostam boasts effusively about not wanting his lover to be tied down by their relationship, a feeling vividly realized by a buoyant combination of shaker, sitar, and twangy guitar. “Back of a Truck,” the album’s best track, continues to expand on this starry-eyed affection, channeling the sugar-rush excitement of falling in love through a breezy, sun-kissed guitar-driven beat. The Clairo-assisted “Hardy” takes an intriguing detour from the album’s cozy, pastoral overtones with a lively baroque hook, but its more classical shift in sound and immediate shift in mood pay off in bringing the album’s most poignant observation to the surface: “Maybe the greatest art is never completed / We only have to leave it knowing we tried.” Rostam’s somberness is even more palpable in “To Feel No Way,” an aching piano ballad in the vein of Carole King that wistfully ruminates on the complicated feelings of being alone for the first time since a breakup.
These intimate existential and romantic musings are the strongest elements of American Stories and also incidentally reflect how inconsequential the album’s Americana motif ultimately is. There are subtle allusions to intergenerational differences in faith (“The Road to Death”) and social activism (“Come Apart”), as well as soft critiques of the systemic corruption corroding our country (“The Weight”), but the gentleness that surrounds them defangs them of their power. The record’s short length, clocking in at just thirty minutes and only nine tracks long, contributes to this as well, keeping its emotional journey at a relative simmer but ending it before it really has a chance to cook. In that sense, the upside-down American flag that graces American Stories’ cover neatly encapsulates the album’s strengths and flaws: Rostam skillfully reinterprets the tropes of country and folk to draw out the complexity of his experiences, but the aesthetic around these genres ends up obscuring the weight of the social commentary the album gestures at. [Matsor]
Sam Rosenberg is a filmmaker and freelance entertainment writer from Los Angeles with bylines in The Daily Beast, Consequence, AltPress, and Metacritic. You can find him on X @samiamrosenberg.
