Romance in contemporary popular music, as it is in life, is hard to come by. Songs of love and lust are commonplace, but romance? It seems to be a luxury we can no longer afford, which is a shame. Romance might only be artifice, but sometimes it's a necessary artifice, presenting an elusive vision that exists in our hearts and can only be made tangible in art. Even if Long Slow Dance, the fourth full-length album by San Francisco psych-pop group the Fresh & Onlys, were not loaded with excellent songs, it would be worthy of affection because it is so unabashedly imbued with this lost sense of romanticism. The band's principal songwriter, Tim Cohen, is pictured on the back cover as a typical po-faced indie rock dude with the de rigueur bushy beard and scraggly, mussed-up 'do. But on the record, he's a tuxedoed Fred Astaire doing a soft-shoe with Ginger Rogers through a wondrous black-and-white world. Lush and love struck, with a light-as-air melodicism that blesses the songs like sprinkles of pixie dust, Long Slow Dance dares to revel in that magical moment between a first kiss and the walk back to the car, and stretch it out to the length of a lifetime memory.
The Fresh & Onlys pointed in this direction on 2010's great Play It Strange, which was kicked off by the band's two best-ever songs, "Summer of Love" and "Waterfall". With its Beach Boys harmonies, gently rolling surf guitar, and Cohen's dreamy, reverb-heavy vocal, "Summer of Love" suggested a mood of escape that the more propulsive "Waterfall" explicitly spelled out in the lyrics. Frequently classified as revivalists, the Fresh & Onlys were actually evolving into sensualists, and that process comes to a head on Long Slow Dance, which deals mainly in expressions of love at its most immediate and pleasurable.
Cohen is never more charming on Long Slow Dance than he is on the title track, a jangly strummer that supplements the Fresh & Onlys' usual 1960s rock touchstones with nods to the Cure and the Church. "You supply the innocent mind/ And I'll bring the guilty heart/ And borne together, we'll make the perfect romance," Cohen sings, his flat baritone cracking just enough to indicate a thawing of his previously cool façade. It's not clear whether the person he's singing to truly exists, nor does it matter; what's important is that Cohen's yearning is relatable even as the evocative music elevates it to poetic heights. Unlike many similar-minded groups that merely allude to prior examples of classic songwriting rather than carry on the tradition, "Long Slow Dance" is a genuinely fantastic example of the form, with Cohen following through a list of "you're wonderful and I'm scum" metaphors as the impossibly comely music conjures a quick tango underneath a starry sky.
The rest of Long Slow Dance nearly matches that high level of swoony wonder. "Dream Girls" is a twangy lament in the vein of Chris Isaak, and "Presence of Mind" sounds custom-made for movie montages, with its giddy marimba flourishes and squiggly dream-sequence guitar riff from Wymond Miles. (It also carries the album's nut graph: "Here lies a man with stars in his eyes/ What does he care if the future is bright?/ The future is bright, after tonight.")
Easily the slickest album the Fresh & Onlys have made yet, Long Slow Dance subtly expands the band's sonic palette without overwhelming the band's appealing simplicity. The sweeping "20 Days and 20 Nights" takes a melancholic turn via a wistful piano solo, while the moody folk-pop tune "Executioner's Song" culminates with a surprisingly expressive horn section. The sinister lo-fi side of the group's personality displayed on its 7"s and 2009's spooky Grey-Eyed Girls has been sublimated. For now, Cohen is playing up the poppiest aspects of his band's sound, occupying the space once owned by the Shins on Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow. With Long Slow Dance, he's made a record for blissfully happy nights.
