Since leaving Mac DeMarco’s touring band in 2013, Peter Sagar has been releasing music as Homeshake. His first two albums albums, In the Shower and Midnight Snack, were not terribly far from DeMarco’s own charm. They were endearing and melancholic, but also introspective and kind of gross. His sound was pleasantly ramshackle, born from groovy guitars, echo, and a lilting, almost bored singing voice. Sagar’s music oozed a languorous, supine, stoned feeling, and he played the guitar as if it were a balloon animal: his riffs were elastic, contorted, and silly.
Overall, on those two records, Sagar’s spin on slacker rock was easy listening, malleable and affecting in the way DeMarco’s rock was anthemic. Both Sagar and DeMarco sell versions of the world that you want to inhabit: devil may care, but anxiously millennial. And of all the musicians spawned from DeMarco’s smokey den (Alex Calder and Walter TV among them), Sagar always seemed poised to be the one to breakout.
On his third album, Fresh Air, Sagar incorporates new tropes, including AM-radio yacht rock and quiet storm R&B, into his practice. He’s incorporated the off-kilter guitar playing of his earlier work into his new sound, cleaved from cheap synthesizers and drum machines, and the result could be described as thrift store synthpop, or as it might have been called eight years ago: chillwave. Generally, this vibe suits Sagar. The architecture of his sound has always held some of the funniest parts of the ’80s at its core. And here, the pure sleaziness he is able to extract from his instruments can be gloriously campy, or unexpectedly elegant and morose. But he’s also capable of laying down the cheese too thick.
In the album’s title track, he pairs together white noise and funky guitars into an inexplicable but personable ballad of loneliness and stress. In the background, a faltering metronome chimes in, giving the song an even more broken down feel. On “Call Me Up” and “Every Single Thing,” Sagar adds unforgettably sugary synth riffs that are equally danceable and mopey. Yet, he also has a tendency to stretch his voice way past his range, sometimes with effects, or through plodding vocal gymnastics. If anything, his voice might be a big reason some of this music falls flat. On “Timing,” his voice is far too brittle to carry the mercurial beat.
But his aesthetic, for better or worse, has not veered too far from his earliest efforts. On early cassettes, and previous albums, the low-quality trappings of his recordings were appealing. Three albums in, it seems like Sagar still has some learning to do. All over Fresh Air lay old tropes: bursts of static, helium-inflected voices, scratchy sound, guitar noodling. The album also lacks cohesive pacing; its level of energy is low enough that it easily becomes background listening. While there isn’t quite anyone who possesses Sagar’s style in the wide world of indie rock, he’ll have to add a few more tricks, lest he fall into rote routine.
