Gardens & Villa are a synthpop band stuck in an existential funk, and we have the Internet to blame. "[We’re] feeling too connected and yet at the end of the day, disconnected from everything/everyone," frontman Chris Lynch recently told Noisey, "feeling like our modern lives are starting to resemble a sci-fi world." At this point in their career, the L.A.-via-Santa Barbara group have managed to carve out a psych-ier niche to set them aside from, say, Phantogram, but they’ve got a synthpop reputation nonetheless. The conflict between technological innovation and organic artistry is a given in modern music, but for digitally-reliant acts like Gardens & Villa, the tug-of-war presents a identity crisis. On their new album Music for Dogs, the band grapple with these 21st-century woes but fail to clinch victory.
Lynch and company have framed Music For Dogs as the playful, punkish cousin to last year’s similarly anxious Dunes, with guitars and piano that temporally situate the record somewhere on the cusp of the '80s (the lush art-pop of Brian Eno and Roxy Music are the most obvious musical touchstones). Indeed, Music for Dogs sounds more kinetic than past efforts, thanks to the group's incorporation of light-footed, plunky pianos ("Express") and ever-so-mathy bridges ("Everybody"). At the same time, there’s a lukewarm quality to the jams (which, despite three- and four-minute runtimes, sound twice as long): the guitars are thin, the drum beats flimsy, the vocals frequently obfuscated by a droning synth or a similar effect. It’s as though Ben Folds attempted to create to Eno's Here Come the Warm Jets while under the influence of sleeping pills.
Considering their previous revelations regarding the album’s reactionary origins, it should come as no surprise that Gardens & Villa get more introspective on Music for Dogs. Crushing loneliness and urban ennui loom overhead like storm clouds—a compelling thematic juxtaposition against the manic singsongs of "Jubilee" and "Everybody". Frequently, these themes manifest in the form of dark, moody new wave. "Alone in the City" contextualizes a scene of Los Angelean longing in the terms of Tears for Fears, and "Maximize Results" sounds like Boy George having a panic attack.
Midway through the album on "General Research", Lynch turns the mirror on us, lamenting the various ways in which technology has torn art (and life, for that matter), asunder… or something like that. His lines are meant to scan as introspective and metaphorical, but clunkers like "Working for the blogs/ Searching for the savior/ Music for the malls" and "Vaporizing cigarettes/ Reverential productions/ Following down the rabbit hole" transmogrify any earnestness into hilarity. Gardens & Villa’s self-conscious, spindling attempts at regression and societal contemplation are admirable and occasionally catchy, but there are so many other albums*—Reflektor, Kid A*, even the oft-maligned, ahead-of-its-time *Metal Machine Music—*that navigate the intricacies of technology and society more compellingly and less heavy-handedly that you can’t help but write it off as another brick in the firewall.
