Michael Angelakos is one of the last guys who needed to do a Reddit AMA. The Passion Pit mastermind has voluntarily shared more intimate parts of his life with the casual music news reader than most people do with their closest friends. He’s spoken with candor about his battles with bipolar disorder and comment section trolls, publicly announced both his divorce and came out as gay in a single podcast with Bret Easton Ellis, and handed over the Passion Pit Twitter account in the name of scientific advocacy. If you smashed that RT, Tremendous Sea of Love showed up in your inbox. If you didn't, it's currently easier to find video of Angelakos receiving an electromagnetic current to his brain than official audio of Passion Pit’s fourth album, one completely divorced from the vestigial “album cycle” that Angelakos has no use for in 2017.
“You’re over the money but under the gun/You came in the front door so where can you run?” he sings to himself on “I’m Perfect,” one of the nine tracks Angelakos pumped onto YouTube under the Wishart Group banner before they disappeared. In both subject matter and execution, Tremendous Sea of Love is Angelakos trying to rediscover the joy of process rather than the satisfaction of product. He said many of these songs were written and uploaded within a day, as if to let us all know that whether he took three years or three hours, it all ends up as data anyways.
As it was in Angelakos’ Boston dorm room, Passion Pit is still a project defined by synaptic synthesizers, blaring falsetto, and relentless major-key melodies. He has never been one to hunch over an acoustic guitar; there are no false starts or tape hiss to signify a more DIY approach. But when he sings about a complicated relationship with his mother over a minimal, staccato string figure on the closing “For Sondra (It Means the World to Me),” he sounds both terrified and freed, finally able to face the kind of raw and confessional songwriting he previously avoided out of instinctual fear.
Raw and confessional are relative for Passion Pit, of course. The extreme dissonance between the hyperglycemic sound of Passion Pit songs and their bitter emotional content should be a starting point, not a revelation. Angelakos said “Take a Walk” is his least favorite song, but it’s still a definitive work in an illustrative way—come for the Doritos Locos commercial, stay for a devastating recount of how the promises of capitalism brought the Angelakos family to America and poisoned its next three generations of men. The full disclosure of Gossamer caused Angelakos to aspire for a well-earned positivity and universality on Kindred, but taking cues from professional, suit-and-tie songwriters like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin (“Holy shit, no one gets to the chorus faster than they do”) led to an album where the stereotype of Angelakos as a jingle writer could’ve stuck.
Meanwhile, no Passion Pit song has ever taken longer to get to the chorus than “Somewhere Up There.” There isn’t a chorus at all, but like Angelakos’ best hooks, the first three minutes can feel frightening and giddy, either a free-fall or a sudden uplift. It’s his idea of a classical suite, stopping mid-air to meditate on Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and ending with a banal phone message from his mother about gardening. No song has done a more convincing job of transposing Angelakos’ centrifugal brain into music and “Somewhere Up There” validates the process of making Tremendous Sea of Love: a stunning artistic achievement and something that would be totally useless to ad execs.
If not a rejection of its predecessor, Tremendous Sea of Love is a reaction to it—while just as streamlined and compact, it lacks the hermetic seal that defined Kindred. When “Inner Dialogue” and “I’m Perfect” abruptly shut down at two-and-a-half minutes, they’re over but not necessarily finished; it’s conceivable that Angelakos could get The Life of Pablo with these songs and add another bridge or pitch-shifted choir. “Hey K” and “You Have the Right” are first-take sequels to the exquisite and ornate “Constant Conversations,” addressing the same person (ex-wife Kristy Mucci), the subject of Angelakos’ crippling remorse and shame, but from a healthier place. “To the Otherside” and “The Undertow” don’t fuss much over their metaphors or really create them at all, but the listener is probably aware that Angelakos is now heading up a potentially game-changing artist’s services group with $250 million worth of funding. Would “I made it to the other side” be any more powerful if it was phrased differently or would it just be more clever?
Whether or not Tremendous Sea of Love actually exists without the legitimizing vestiges of the music business, it relieves Angelakos from the burdens of having to reestablish the Passion Pit brand in the way that peers such as MGMT and Phoenix will once they return. It’s presented as a gift—free of charge, with a targeted audience, but not necessarily an altruistic act. “I wrote this album to tell myself and to tell you that you were always good enough,” Angelakos wrote via a typed, smudged letter that serves currently as his pinned Tweet. “I do not need your money. I just want you, I just NEED you, to listen to me.” On “I’m Perfect,” Angelakos is honest about the coexistence of neediness and grandiosity in his superego: “Tell me I’m so damn perfect/Tell me it all of the time.” But even if you did, Angelakos doesn't sound like he'd believe it anyway. Tremendous Sea of Love isn't perfect, nor is it meant to be; under the weight of the world, we should just aspire to be good enough from now on.
