My introduction to the Softlightes was the video for "Heart Made of Sound", the beaming title track of the SoCal quartet's 2006 EP. A stop-motion marvel directed by Kris Moyes, the three-minute clip spells out the song's childlike lyrics, Napoleon Dynamite-style, with found household objects from Post-It Notes and paper clips to bananas, kitchen utensils, and shoelaces. It cleverly complements the gentle whimsy of a piano-dappled acoustic number about, well, getting stuck in clouds and listening to trees.
The Softlightes' debut full-length extends that cutesy sensibility to other soft, light indie pop styles. Singer/songwriter Ron Fountenberry and bassist Kristian Dunn formed the group out of the pastel-colored ashes of previous project the Incredible Moses Leroy, which folded following 2003's somewhat more soulful The Incredible Moses Leroy Become the Soft.Lightes, helmed by Beck drummer Joey Waronker. On the self-produced Say No to Being Cool - Say Yes to Being Happy, the Softlightes at times become rather too saccharine, belying their naïve-pop formulation.
For all their soft-hearted subject matter, the Softlightes sound more like former labelmate Ben Lee or recent Flaming Lips than, say, the Boy Least Likely To. Their style is a pristine amalgam of sleepy acoustic guitars, restrained electronics, and Foutenberry's boyish, feathery voice. "Girlkillsbear" settles for recreating the Postal Service's Give Up with more awkward lyrics ("You're like an army, baby/ When you start to cry"), while "The Robots in My Bedroom Were Playing Arena Rock" is a silly detour into playful riff-rock led by nonsensical vocoder vox á la Daft Punk. More typical of the Softlightes is the shambling folk-pop of "A Town Named Blue".
The group's no-rough-edges aesthetic can't airbrush away some uneven songwriting. Yeah, "Heart Made of Sound" remains an evocative exercise in innocent pop, though its chorus ("They want you, but they don't believe to want you") still leaves me scratching my head. But "The Microwave Song" pins its hopes on an overblown chorus based on the inane mantra, "I am just a microwave." Meanwhile, the childhood reminiscences of "Leanor and Me"-- with a spare bassline that hints at Bobby Darin's "Beyond the Sea"-- come off a bit rose-colored, as Fountenberry recalls, "We were there when Johnny Lemon died... I didn't know his music yet." Cute pop can be an antidote to much of recent rock's self-seriousness, but the Softlightes' neutered approach too frequently cloys. Anything else good on YouTube tonight?
