The first thing to note is that it's a wonderful thing when bands change. By this I mean when bands genuinely change: not when they "mature" or when they "incorporate subtle electronic flourishes," but when they actually surprise you, popping up like friends who've been gone for years and reappear with bold new haircuts.
Adult. have pretty much changed. Their twelve-inch records so far-- most of them collected on the Resuscitation CD-- have been stocked with some of the buzziest, punkiest electro going, as well as some of the hookiest: their nervous strobelight grind couldn't have been any less opposed to the pop sensibility it was standing on. Their last single, a happily shouty bouncer called "Don't Stop", had at least a few of us expecting their first proper album to be some sort of fine-tuned pop breakthrough. And it is, but not nearly in the way you'd think.
The definitive departure here comes on a track called "Glue Your Eyelids Together", which you can tell is sort of a mission statement when you notice the picture in the liners of Adam Lee Miller and Nicola Kuperus doing exactly that. Look carefully: Miller's bottle of Elmer's is rebranded Ersatz Audio. And then listen as casually as you want, and you'll still notice that Miller is now playing bass.
Right: everyone's always called them "punks", and now they're living up to it by being post-punks. The drum machine, previously popping forcefully in the center of the mix, now blurts and snaps from one corner of a very large room. Somewhere closer is Miller, charging sharply around on a massively fuzzed-up bassline. And right there in our collective face, her taunting chant no longer processed into tech-land, is Kuperus, bouncing and cheerleading: "Glue your eyelids together! Glue your eyelids together!"
This time the "post-punk" isn't a metaphor. The sound has plenty to do with what happened when the artier punks of the late 70s started messing with synths, like a hyper child's redrawing of Cabaret Voltaire's "Nag Nag Nag"-- and a little to do with the evil-techie buzz that's come out of the Pacific Northwest more recently (see: Mocket's "Monitress"). And like a lot of the best post-punk, this is going to sound like a great shoddy mess to a whole lot of people: just the raw pulse of a four-note bass slice, punchy synth exclamations, needling sneers from Kuperus, and a great big slap of a snare drum keeping pace. It will provoke hatred and eye-rolling and accusations of soulless charlatanism, and at least one acquaintance has declared it "the most annoying thing ever recorded." But it's also terrifically, needlingly catchy, bratty fist-in-the-air catchy: in its best moments it sounds like Joy Division having a panic attack.
Which is, of course, Adult.'s whole business: Anxiety Always, it's called, and there's even more jittery, spazzy insistence here than on those twelve-inches. There's also more of the deeper, more ominous exploration that filled some of those records' b-sides: the album creeps ominously in on the instrumental swell of "The Cold Call", and its second half opens equally slowly, repeating, tangling, and rearranging one line: "People: you can confuse them.../ Into a disorienting babble."
There's also something of the Adult. of old, only the hyper-precise turnarounds are subdued into a careful trance: "Shake Your Head" bubbles and flutters with dangerous purpose, and "Kick in the Shin"-- pictured on rear CD tray-- has an almost-smooth gloss on its deep electro, with Kuperus very nearly crooning over it. The rigidly groovy pop of "Don't Stop" comes back on another high point, "Nothing of the Kind", which is filled with a weird, scratchy twang that makes you imagine Miller wearing a cowboy hat as he plays its treble-heavy bassline. The big field trips come on "We Know How to Have Fun", a blurry, murky void you can spend hours parsing, and the new "Nervous (Wreck)", a complex and evil-sounding instrumental that feels like the soundtrack to an old video game about werewolves.
But we're also gluing our eyelids together, and from there it escalates. "Blank Eyed, Nose Bleed" wraps its synths' brittle zapping with another paranoid cheer: "I've been working on increasing my anxiety!" Here I should remind you that Adult. really do have a sense of humor. Remembering this may be necessary to get through "Turn Your Back"-- which is not to say that they're joking, but Kuperus is going to go "neh neh neh" at you, and you're going to want to be on her side when it happens.
Because that's the sort of wonderful change this is: a high-wire hop, the kind of shift that tries to walk fearlessly onto a patch of ground surrounded by pitfalls. It's tempting to call it one of the most messily brilliant things we'll see all year, but it can't, in good faith, be recommended to everyone: if the duo's buzzy neurosis was enough to drive some people nuts before, the raw jumping and nagging of Anxiety Always will sound to many like the shoddiest, most amusical sham to be held up as a masterpiece in many of our lives. No joke: this album would annoy all hell out of some of you, would sound like everything cruel about music wrapped into a single package whose creators seem actively proud that they couldn't care less. But if you're at all ready to run with it, you might find yourself in one of the more fun positions music lovers can get into: wondering for ten minutes whether you're hearing an embarrassing wreck or a stroke of genius, and then realizing in an ecstatic flash that it is so the latter.
