And to think: People considered Vampire Weekend divisive. How about a V-dub spinoff featuring their keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij (the dude who typically looks like he's wearing three keffiyehs to everyone else's one) and Wes Miles from Ra Ra Riot (the dude who looks like...well, until our recent Pitchfork TV shoot with them even we weren't sure what he looked like) making bedroom R&B? It worked for Junior Boys, right? Granted, they pulled it off with precision, style, and disarming observations about heartache. Discovery, true to their name, sound more simply wide-eyed and eager. In fact, the whole thing comes off like one in a line of acts from the Shaggs to Jonathan Richman to Grandmaster Flash to Orange Juice, artists so in love with big, communicative pop that they had to take a shot at making the stuff-- technical, financial, or God-given limitations be damned.
So sure, knees are going to jerk just from the description, albeit for questionable reasons. Because there's nothing inherently wrong with the approach here, it's just the execution that can frustrate. The idea that a few eager white kids can't play with contemporary notions of R&B is of course a load of bullshit. See: Dirty Projectors, the E Street Band, the Rolling Stones-- hell, the whole British Invasion. Cringing at some people because they appropriate the textures and sounds of modern black music is a weirdly conservative and territorial reaction that forgets that quite a bit (if not all) of the forward momentum of pop/rock music over the past five decades was due to cultural cross-pollination. Cynics could sneer that pop/rock stopped having forward momentum a few decades ago and they'd have a point, and the sort of wannabe duality that leads people to piss and moan about the mere existence of a group like Discovery is arguably part of the problem and the reason why that momentum arguably halted in the first place.
So, yeah, there is going to be a lot of contextual talk about Discovery, same as there was about VW. And this thing is even a divisive listen: The first half is weirdly awesome in places, confounding in that exciting way where someone comes along and ruptures expectations, creating something both straightforward and pleasing that's also head-scratching. Discovery's sonic strengths bring to mind VW, boosting Batmanglij's claim as the central figure in the latter's sound. The groups' music aren't directly related-- there's no highlife or soukous influence in Discovery, and there might not be a single shared instrument between the two. But the spacial relationship and the approach to sonics are similar: Batmanglij's tones in both places are rounded and warm, eschewing the harsh mid-range of many current recordings. Space and pauses are important, giving the songs a dramatic tilt even when they're primitively constructed. Simplicity is the rule with both, repetition is often key, and in each case, the bands pleasantly (too pleasantly, for some tastes) draw in a listener rather than bludgeon them.
The record kicks off with "Orange Shirt", "Osaka Train Loop", and "Can You Discover?", a quietly audacious 1-2-3 of quirky songs about playing pretend jetsetter made by a couple of quietly quirky guys playing pretend pop stars. It's like an extended dismantling of Dirty Projectors' "Stillness Is the Move" spreading the parts over three songs, creating a more straightforward facsimile than that art-obsessed project would ever dream of. Eventually they even invite Dirty Projectors' Angel Deradoorian to do that melismatic skat thing she does all over "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". "So Insane" then shows up with Miles picking up Deradoorian's stop-start vocals and, holy shit, they're kind of pulling this off.
And then, the second half of the record. There's a solid Ezra Koenig collab here but for the most part the whole thing starts to go from crisp and pulsing to sort of static and mushy. The rank amateurishness of the producers comes to the fore, and starts to sound like kids playing dress-up Justin Timberlake; less modern geek-pop, more bad "Sleng Teng"/M.I.A. goofs and a teeth-gnashing cover of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back". In essence, the first half sounds like they're making music without looking over their shoulders-- it's most assuredly their sensibilities, they're simply working with a different set of tools and aims than with their typical groups. Then the second sounds like pastiche, like tongues becoming lodged into cheeks as a substitute for having anything at all to say, musically or lyrically.
Weird thing is, most people will have less of a fence-sitting take. This could be your favorite or most-hated record of the year, and there aren't many records one could say that about. But here, the split really comes down to choices in instrumentation, i.e., favoring electronics over guitars. As I moaned in an otherwise enthusiastic review of (the still underrated!) Dark Was the Night compilation earlier this year, there are some sad filters regarding the so-called roots of sounds increasingly being applied to certain sections of the indie rock spectrum. The indie world can't live on fingerpicking and textural guitars alone, and a variety of sounds and multiculturalism in indie rock isn't the enemy here; shitty Jackson 5 covers are.
