Lower Dens have toyed with the raw pleasure of pop music in the past, but they’ve never embraced it like this. Three years ago, the Baltimore band’s standout single "Brains" shone as a melodic gem inside the largely experimental Nootropics; now, on the band’s third album, core songwriter Jana Hunter embraces open, ringing melodies. Like a lot of current music, Escape From Evil siphons its aesthetic from the storied pop of the '80s, but it’s not content to stop at homage. Lower Dens use the past—its clichés and its innocence—as a lens through which to imagine a queer and open future.
As an aesthetic reservoir, the '80s continue to feed an abundance of nostalgia, from the American highway fantasies of the War on Drugs to Twin Shadow’s boy-meets-girl melodramas. Inhabiting characters from the past can lend a singer a certain gravitas; unburdened by modern irony, big emotions play bigger on a decades-old frame. But few artists have seized that retrospection as an opportunity to flip the power dynamics that governed pop culture 30 years ago. For Lower Dens, a neon palette serves as fertile ground for subversion. Hunter absorbs the range of gendered feeling from Billy Idol to Bonnie Tyler, emerging as a bandleader capable of flipping effortlessly between extremes of masculine aggression and feminine yearning.
The word "genderfluid" didn’t exist 30 years ago, but it’s a useful term for gripping the edges of this new work. The video for the album’s lead single "To Die in L.A." works almost as a queer retelling of William Friedkin’s 1985 drama To Live and Die in L.A., complete with characters that aren’t cast based on their actors’ birth-assigned gender. Hunter appears as a masculine presence in a buzz cut and suit to glower at the video’s lead femme, who’s vying for movie stardom; in the clip’s last image, the main character sets fire to a painting of herself, then she and Hunter gaze into the flames as it burns away.
The video is full of ambiguous, evocative imagery, and Escape From Evil also runs thick with powerful, slippery emotions. While Hunter seems more enamored of radio hits by the likes of Gary Numan and Flock of Seagulls here, Lower Dens never quite settle into an easy genre hook. A krautrock chug left over from 2012’s Nootropics powers "Company", where Hunter assumes the role of anonymous authority figure with lines like "you look really uncomfortable if I might be honest" and "we just want to help." You can hear the same smirk that Mike Patton wore on Faith No More’s "Land of Sunshine", the same glee in inhabiting a vague malice disguised as aid.
Hunter is a charismatic singer willing to deal in grand, sweeping gestures and also idiosyncratic specifics. Escape From Evil is a vivid world of queer retrofuturism, a wide open space that offers access the emotionality of the recent past without subscribing to its violence. Hunter embraces retro-pop as a channel of escape from the power that routes us in our mundane outer lives. In the world of this album, no one will tell you who to be or where to go; it’s all yours to become.
