New Zealand's Opossom are an excellent indie pop band whose excellence is so narrow they seem less a band than a sleekly designed indie pop delivery system. The 10 songs on their lightly grooving, lightly melancholic debut, Electric Hawaii, are all pretty in almost the exact same way: pitched at the same breezy, cool, Xanax-blue mid-tempo shuffle, with lead singer Kody Nielson laying his creamy, sighing voice atop in precisely the same way. If the drummer has mastered another drumbeat other than the "Tomorrow Never Knows" one, he's not letting on. The jazz-flecked chord progressions that send the choruses tumbling through their dreamy motions give the album a faint shpritz of spy-movie cool. They stop to indulge exactly one instrumental freak out (on "Cola Elixir"), and immediately afterward, they spit-smooth this stray lock back in place and carry on. It's an unsexy but rewarding approach: You might not need all 10 of these songs in a row, but any one, two, or three of them would make for pleasant company.
Nielson is the brother of Unknown Mortal Orchestra's Ruban Nielson, and you can imagine a family dinner table with some Felix-and-Oscar tension around it: Opossom are fussy where UMO are shaggy. If both bands seem stoner-friendly, UMO is a pipe clogged with resin and Opossom a carefully sterilized stainless-steel vaporizer. Electric Hawaii shines like a model kitchen's immaculate surfaces, which means that there is a whiff of Nowhere-ness to the band's sound: on "Blue Meanies", Nielson sounds eerily like Guero-era Beck, while on "Girl" he sounds more like Panda Bear's brother than UMO's. Even when the sound palette shifts sneakily-- the cello that courses gracefully through the chorus of "Getaway Tonight", for example, or the neatly orchestrated stop-and-start structure of "Watchful Eye"-- it can be hard to notice. None of it does much to disturb the music's glossy yawn.
The vaguely Wes Anderson-styled video for "Fly"-- quirky scientists, quirky experiment, quirky UFOs-- cements the overall impression left by Electric Hawaii, that you could have stumbled across Opossom on MTV in the late 90s or early 00s, when a band could still surface with a memorable, narrow sound, an eye-catching video, and have a hit or two. (My mental Rolodex slots them somewhere north of Rooney's "Blue Side" and somewhere slightly south of Space's "The Female of the Species".) To Opossom's credit, there are several potential versions of that hit here: "Fly", "Blue Meanies", and "Outer Space" all seem equally viable. There is a lot of craft to admire in the songwriting, and in the perfectly sepia-tinged production. But Electric Hawaii is an album that's easier to bop your head to while idly imagining the technology commercial it could soundtrack than it is to engage with.
