Local Natives epitomized L.A. indie with the airy harmonies, hirsute style, and earnest ambition of their lovably scrappy debut, 2010’s Gorilla Manor. As the decade comes to a close, they still do. A collaboration with the director Van Alpert and visual artist Public-Library on the video for the Shawn Everett-produced single “Café Amarillo” puts Local Natives just one degree of separation from Post Malone, Drake, Kacey Musgraves, and Nike, rather than Grizzly Bear and Fleet Foxes. But that kind of development is part of the inevitable gentrification that comes with long-term success. In 2019, you can hear the music of recent L.A. emigre Wild Nothing in 24 Hour Fitness and pay $3000 a month to call Wavves your landlord.
The band has frequently been acclaimed (and occasionally criticized) for its uncanny ability to embody the sound of a particular moment, but the unusually direct lyricism and domestic mindset of Violet Street key the album not to the 2010s, specifically, but young adulthood in general—transitioning from post-grad uncertainty to adult grief to idealism to disillusion and, now, the business of getting on with the rest of their lives.
Local Natives have led by example on that front. In 2017, under the Jaws of Love. alias, Kelcey Ayer released Tasha Sits Close to the Piano, a collection of tender ballads so intimate that they felt like a wedding gift made public. Bassist Nik Ewing covered Dennis Wilson’s troubled cult classic Pacific Ocean Blue in its entirety, and Taylor Rice got married, an event addressed here on the sleek, shimmering “When Am I Gonna Lose You.” Alongside Violet Street’s classy, retro sleeve, the new songs carry a thematic and sonic timelessness, a welcome sidestep after Sunlit Youth’s overreaching currency. The broad uplift in both the synth pop and politics of songs like “Fountain of Youth” feels frozen in a much happier, more innocent time, somewhere between a 6 p.m. Coachella set and hearing “Fight Song” at an “I’m With Her” rally.
Most of Violet Street focuses on the unsung upkeep of relationships. If not especially sexy subject matter, it’s substantial enough to balance the aloe-infused smoothness of “When Am I Gonna Lose You” and “Café Amarillo” that carries over from Sunlit Youth. Local Natives have never shied from expanding their reach, and Violet Street’s singles could easily slide into drive-time playlists between the similarly soul-infused pop-rock of latter-day Beck, Haim, or Cage the Elephant, even though they are too emotionally jittery to feel comfortable, despite the luxe materials and enviable backdrops.
Most of Violet Street’s lyrics bear that out literally. Rice traces the California coastline toward Big Sur with his wife on “When Am I Gonna Lose You,” unable to enjoy the moment for what it is; Ayer is halfway between Dover and Calais on “Café Amarillo," in search of grounding; formative memories of drinking cheap vodka admit the echoes of Dodger Stadium are slivers of sunlight in the June gloom of “Garden of Elysian”; while Wilshire Boulevard is reimagined as a post-apocalyptic wasteland on “Megaton Mile.”
But for all of the globe-trotting that went into Violet Street, Local Natives remain quintessentially SoCal: genial, approachable, and optimistic, even if their surroundings are liable to be on fire or crumbling into the sea. Even the grim doomsaying of “Megaton Mile” sounds like a backyard party at ground zero, a soundclash of Earth, Wind and Fire’s ecstatic vocal volleys and “Gimme Shelter.” To the same extent that their artistic peak, Hummingbird, bore the deep blue imprint of its producer (the National’s Aaron Dessner), Violet Street follows Everett’s code of organic experimentalism.
Local Natives don’t claim particularly esoteric influences; there’s something refreshingly quaint in the way they still gush over Frank Ocean and “Pyramid Song,” and designed “Munich II” to sync up with the intro to Drive. But whereas their integration of modern R&B felt a little too obvious on Sunlit Youth songs like “Coins,” to say nothing of their Beyoncé cover, Local Natives sound liberated by Everett’s oblique strategies, bringing the same kinetic energy they used to bash floor toms to stitch together samples in ProTools.
They created the symphonic soul of “Megaton Mile” by feeding loops to the mixing console and playing “a game of Twister” on the faders; the “musical time machine” app Radiooooo spawned the Silver Lake sunrise of “Munich II”; and the brief return to their previous album’s blaring KROQ synths, on “Gulf Shores,” is actually a guitar run through fuzz pedals. The harmonies still have the tendency to gloss over the grit in the lyrics, but the refrain on “Café Amarillo” goes to the heart of an album that balances immediate lyrics and inscrutable methods, to ends both experimental and elemental: “Some things are so simple, they’re impossible to explain.”
