In the handful of years they've been making music together as Javelin, pop collagists (and real life cousins) George Langford and Tom Van Buskirk have never been afraid to push their luck. With their irreverently fun, homemade 2009 "mixtape" Jamz n Jemz and their proper debut follow up No Mas the next year (a somewhat cleaner take on their ⌘-C, ⌘-V approach), Javelin established themselves at the head of an expanding pack of artists whose idea of composition more closely resembled a ransom note cut-and-pasted together from an old stack of XXL, Tiger Beat, and Wire magazines. But instead of remaining content with merely kicking out more jamz, Langford and Van Buskirk set their sights frontier-ward, releasing a cyber-Western 10" EP with an accompanying Kickstarter film. There was a very real chance that Javelin's interest would continue to splinter into deeper, stranger abysses, and for a time it seemed like a good thing. Though it's unlikely you've thrown Canyon Candy on much since it came out, it's hard to deny the fact that Javelin's smarts and the samples have made following their trajectory worthwhile.
But during the lead-up to their new album Hi Beams, the winds changed direction. If you happened to catch them on tour in the last year or so, you were likely treated to favorites like "Vibrationz", but also some very awkward, Karmin-esque covers of quasi-current rap radio hits, and of course the road testing of new material that, for all intents and purposes, you could also label as Karmin-esque. If this at all seemed disconcerting, there's little chance that Hi Beams in full is going to do much of anything to rectify those feelings. Doing away with their trademark samples, Hi Beams is Javelin's first real studio record, a slick-sounding genre-collision that feels somewhat congruent with the life-affirming focus of peers like Tanlines, only unrelentingly goofy. Despite its well-meaning disposition, you can't help but notice how frankly annoying Hi Beams can be: Cybernetic vocals rise and fall with the cadence of a plainspoken nursery rhyme over pop-informed hip-hop appropriations that come off as gratingly cutesy. In trying to write honest-to-goodness songs, Javelin have inexplicably lost their sense of musicality, ignoring their hookier impulses in favor of a sound that feels both plastic and a little soulless.
Much of Hi Beams is means to translate as outsized fun, but where it should elicit big, dumb grins, you'll likely feel an embarrassed surge of hot blood rush to your already reddened cheeks instead. "Nnormal" (a baffling choice for a first single) fancies itself as some sort of warped brand of robot rock but comes off like a companion piece to "Nothing Ever Happens On Mars". Worse is "Judgement Night", which interrupts a cheesed-out interpolation of Peter Gabriel gone ratchet with giant squalls of jock-metal guitar (to its credit, there are no vocals). Not everything is quite as glaring, but rather either unappealingly cheeky ("Friending", "Drummachines") or blandly earnest ("Light Out", "The Stars").
The takeaways here are slight, but still evident thanks to their years spent sample-mining. Langford and Van Buskirk have good ears, as a lot of the individual sounds on Hi Beams-- deep bass thuds, crisp hand claps, UFO-guided synths-- sound great on their own. It's too bad that they're implemented in ways that don't curry them much favor. In instances where things do come together-- like on the lite-disco of "Airfield", the Mark Mothersbaugh-checking snippet "Garth Hudson", or the piano-lead "City Pals"-- there are inklings of potential, but in the end these songs still can't help sounding like a discount Toro Y Moi track, a suite from a Wes Anderson movie that hit the editing-room-floor, and a too-plucky TV show theme song, respectively. It's obvious that Hi Beams was meant to be a candy-colored experience, but instead of inducing a sugar rush, it results in little more than a fitful stomach ache. But the real disappointment lies in the sense that Javelin decided now was the time to quit horsing around and become a "real band." What they lost sight of in turn was the fact that they already had a pretty damn good one to begin with.
