Keep your ears open, and you can hear Passion Pit everywhere around you: in fast food commercials and YouTube pre-roll ads you can’t wait to skip, the skewed pop maximalism of PC Music and its imitators, the glossy hybrid EDM-pop of Madeon and Zedd, even the clutter of Taylor Swift’s work with Jack Antonoff on 1989. It’s easy to take for granted now, but Michael Angelakos’ first two records shifted the pop paradigm in meaningful ways. Manners hooked up the '80s synth-pop of M83’s Saturdays=Youth to a glucose IV, piling on children’s choirs and waves of orchestration and Angelakos’ signature falsetto until it forced you into submission; three years later, Gossamer ramped up the density, scale, and emotional rawness of Angelakos’ writing, as he built glittering castles around love, death, and the redeeming power of joy. That rawness is what separates Passion Pit from its lesser contemporaries, and from bands who would seek to duplicate their success: Angelakos' songs dance on the line between sweet and saccharine, but they’re anchored by real stakes. They’re full of light because you can use a lot of it when you’re holding a candle to the darkness.
Kindred is Angelakos’ first record after conducting an unflinching, very public self-examination of his mental health and its effects on his life and loved ones, a process that dominated both Gossamer and the press cycle around the record. Instead of doubling down on that kind of reflection, Angelakos shifts focus to the parts of his life that gave him strength as he endured personal and professional turmoil: his family, his faith, and the radiant love that springs from both. It’s also his most concise record to date, a far cry from the sprawl of both Manners and Gossamer: it’s only 10 songs, and the songs themselves are more interested in speed and economy.
The best songs are the ones that really take that idea of efficiency to heart, stripping away fluff and frippery to focus on core melodic ideas or compositional concepts. This marks a major change in Angelakos’ songwriting: most listeners would agree that Gossamer’s best moments were its biggest, whether the frenzied Rustie-isms of "I’ll Be Alright" or the massive, starlit "Hideaway". That’s not the case here on Kindred, where the highlights hew closer to the soulful heartbreaker "Constant Conversations". There are a lot of moving parts on something like "Whole Life Story", a song-length apology to Angelakos’ wife for the scrutiny placed on their lives post-Gossamer, but each of them are clear and discernible rather than overwhelming, and lithe pop-funk jam "Where the Sky Hangs" sets a new record for "audible space in a Passion Pit song."
When Angelakos opts for an arrangement that recalls the density of his older work, you find yourself wishing he had opted for a similarly pared down approach. "All I Want" is a good example. Its core message—being struck dizzy and dumb by your love for someone, and rejoicing in it with a simple, gorgeous melody—is compromised by the use of every tool in Angelakos’ toolbox: whirring dervishes spat out on guitar, vocal pieces whispering like ghosts in the background, glittering doodads glued on like rhinestones. On earlier albums, the tremendous scale and layering of his songs felt purposeful, like it was meant to reflect the buzzing hornets’ nest in Angelakos’ brain; when he tries to do the same thing on Kindred it feels aimless, a choice that doesn’t move songs forward or help to advance any ideas.
This is also a very spiritual record, which shouldn't be a surprise if you've pored over Angelakos' lyric sheets before. (Consider Gossamer closer "Where We Belong", where after alluding to a suicide attempt Angelakos sings, "Who says that God exists?/ We can't see icons or myths, but/ Well, I believe in you/ Do you believe in me, too?") Opener "Lifted Up (1985)" is another glowing ode to Angelakos' wife, but it traffics in the language of apotheosis: Instead of being born, she descends from heaven, and when she threatens to float back Angelakos grounds her with the force of their love. The album is otherwise scattered with references to prayer and the exertion of subtle divine force, like the conspicuous cloud cover of "Looks Like Rain" and the baptism/savior imagery of "My Brother Taught Me How to Swim". This kind of writing isn't as obviously courageous as the work he did on Gossamer, but it still takes plenty of bravery to write frankly about faith in a medium where it's usually ignored or neglected. It takes guts to say, in effect, "I had to work really hard to get better, and embracing something bigger than myself really helped me." And while Angelakos has never been a particularly artful lyricist, he writes with a wide-eyed sincerity and frankness that makes you want to root for him.
As the first document of Angelakos' shift towards a different songwriting approach, one more focused on efficiency and pop purity than complexity or breadth, Kindred is ultimately both a transitional moment and a mixed bag. Not every song on Manners and Gossamer worked, but at their very least they had something to keep your attention, some grippy sonic piece. Kindred lives and dies on the strength of its melodies, and some of those melodies are submarined by excess rather than enhanced by it. When the album's highlights click ("Whole Life Story", "Where the Sky Hangs", "Looks Like Rain") they're as powerful and resonant as anything in the band's discography, but the chances of success feel a little lower than they were before.
It turns out that the year's best Passion Pit song, and the one that realizes the full potential of Angelakos' new ambitions, isn't even on Kindred. "Pay No Mind", a single from Madeon's excellent March debut Adventure, is the kind of the song that couldn't exist without Passion Pit in the first place—a colorful fusion of pop, funk, and EDM featuring a typically chirpy vocal performance from Angelakos. His connection to the song's lyrics is obvious, a fraternal twin of "Whole Life Story" that finds Angelakos asking for forgiveness and encouraging his loved ones to ignore the external forces swirling around them. It's catchy without relying on gimmickry, undeniably personal, and totally piercing; it's the kind of song I'd love to find more often on Kindred.
