It’s been four years since Mates of State released their sixth and most recent album, Mountaintops, but it feels like it’s been a lot longer. During that span of time, the scattered scene they once represented has only receded even further into the past, leaving them unmoored—out of time at best, irrelevant at worst. A decade ago Jason Hammel and Kori Gardner were one of so many co-ed power-pop duos competing for that cold "O.C." cash: Georgie James out of D.C., the Rosebuds out of North Carolina, the Like Young from Chicago, Viva Voce from way out in Portland. Most of them were romantically entangled; all of them got by more on energy than on actual hooks.
Few were quite so early to the scene as Mates of State, who hooked up in 1997 and started a band shortly after. At first, they were drums (Hammel) and organ (Gardner), but soon they expanded into synths and programmed beats, even the occasional guitar—all without losing their default setting of aggressively cute. That adaptability might have been their saving grace, as Mates soldiered on while others stumbled. On one hand, they were on the fringe of a postmillennial movement loosely known as "joycore," which tried to make pop exuberance sound radical, if not quite radicalized. But Mates of State made Architecture in Helsinki and the Go! Team sound like the Fall and Wire by comparison, perhaps because their primary subject wasn’t the world around them but the world they made together. Listeners were either charmed or chagrined by the moony eyes they made at each other onstage. Even if they never enjoyed much mainstream success beyond the occasional television soundtrack placement, you can hear their influence in the DIY pop of Karmin and the Ting Tings, which is not the most enviable legacy.
The tone of this review might sound like an obituary, but Mates of State are far from dead. "Staring Contest", the first track on their comeback EP You’re Going to Make It, almost makes a case for this type of precocious blisspop, with its cheeky burbles of synths, its roughhousing-with-the-kids drums, and the intimate interplay between Hammel and Gardner’s vocals. "I used to be wild!" they exclaim to each other. "I’m wild about you!" The best thing about the song is that they don’t sound like they’re lamenting their mutual domestication, but celebrating it. They’d rather be tamed.
On the very next song, however, they sound too tame—old and curmudgeonly even. "Beautiful Kids" is one of those songs that rails against the youngs and their selfie sticks and social medias while bemoaning the death of magazines and stuff. "You’re always staring into cracked scenes," they accuse. "You should stare into my eyes more." They build a bridge out of dial tones and cash registers: "you go click click click…" It’s one of the most embarrassing musical passages of the year. By comparison, "I Want to Run" and "Gonna Get It" both play it safe, risking little by relying on that pop ebullience that comes suspiciously easy to them.
Domesticity is one of the great undersung subjects in pop music. The immensity and excitement of new love has inspired countless tunes since forever, and the devastation and misery of dead love has inspired even more. But there are far fewer songs about love that endure and flourish from one comfortable day to the next, through anniversaries and birthdays, through kids and mortgages, through all the hard work that makes a marriage work. You’re Going to Make It makes life sound like one big bouncy castle of fun, and that unquestioned contentment renders Mates of State musically anonymous. By the time Gardner bares her soul on closer "Sides of Boxes", the gravity of the situation—her realization that her daughters will grow up and eventually leave—sounds incongruous and disjointed. "It’s like a cannonball went through our home, you are almost fully grown," she sings as the song fades poignantly. It sounds like the start of a compelling album, not the end of an inert EP.
