In 2010, Raphaelle Standell-Preston and Alexander Cowan spent a couple of months wandering around Central America, and when they came back they made an EP that sounded like an uncommonly lyrical "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" essay: eight songs of humid, sun-kissed, heart-on-its-cut-off-sleeve electro-pop. Of course, Blue Hawaii was not the only band on the beach in 2010, but Blooming Summer managed to sound like something unique. Standell-Preston's voice moved through these songs like a jellyfish, tumbling with such grace that its sudden sting came as a surprise. "I think about you thrusting into her," she sang on the best song "Blue Gowns", her voice full of anguished jealousy and self-reproach, "And I ask myself, how stupid can you get?" Blooming Summer captured the joys and fears of a new relationship (Standell-Preston and Cowan are a couple) with careful precision, but it also felt unassumingly excellent. Blooming Summer had a quiet release on then-very-niche label Arbutus; you can still download it on their Bandcamp for $1. Standell-Preston became better known for fronting the more guitar-driven band Braids, while Blue Hawaii seemed destined to be a side project little known to people outside the couple's friends in the Montreal DIY scene. Then, of course, that scene blew up.
Sudden, international attention is sometimes enough to make a tight-knit regional scene implode, but in the past few months a few other artists have risen to the occasion and started to fill out the spotlight that Grimes has shone on her home scene Montreal. Doldrums, the scrappy, sample-heavy project from junkyard dreamer Airick Woodhead, stepped up with Lesser Evil, a full-length debut full of soaring, dystopian party anthems, while brooding duo Majical Cloudz recently made the leap from Arbutus to indie-giant Matador on the heels of a strong, idea-packed EP. But there's a downside to this kind of opportunity; people move on. "As friends grow past the Montreal scene and leave, there's a kind of falling apart there,” Cowan said in a recent FADER interview. When you listen to Blue Hawaii's first proper full-length, Untogether, this comment feels not like a diss to anybody in particular so much as a creative statement of purpose; it contextualizes the themes of disconnect, alienation and independence that coarse through Untogether. As Standell-Preston put it, "I think [making the record] was an attempt to find the glue as everything was drifting apart."
She was actually talking about her partnership with Cowan as much as her hometown. (Well, creatively speaking, not romantically-- they're still together.) In the three years since the cohesive Blooming Summer, they’ve ventured down slightly separate paths: Standell-Preston's taken a more new-agey route (experimenting with avant-garde make-up in performance; making small-talk about chakras in interviews) while Cowan spent some time absorbing EDM culture in Europe. But, true to its title, Untogether is less interested in blending all its competing enthusiasms together and more intent on emphasizing the space that separates them-- in that way at least, it's kind of the anti-Visions. Standell-Preston's vocals are routinely snipped, chopped and pasted back together like ransom notes, while Cowan steers the tracks with underlying trancelike rhythms. Untogether sometimes feels like a reaction against Blooming Summer's easy, inviting pop pleasures-- which is not necessarily a bad thing. At its most evocative, Untogether creates the eerie feeling of being the only person in a cavernous, strobe-lit club. Take the awesome two-part highlight "In Two"-- where the atmosphere's so diffuse and desolate that even a sudden intrusion of handclaps doesn't feel like a moment of collectivity or unity. Instead, it only emphasizes the feeling of isolation: the claps sound distant, drifted in, and possibly made by ghosts.
"The other day, I had a beautiful thought," Standell-Preston sings on the closing track, "The Other Day", and then lets loose the most elegant-sounding DGAF in recent memory, "What if I didn’t care at all?" It's a freeing moment-- unclasping the pressures of the scene, the stress of communicating with another person, and all the other anxieties that have pulsed beneath the 10 songs that came before it. It's also a much-needed moment of repose. The problem with Untogether is that that Blue Hawaii occasionally get carried away with emphasizing and embracing disjointedness. Cowan's fingers are a little trigger happy, and so the subdued, gradually unfurling beauty of "The Other Day" hints at what might have happened had they given some of these songs a little more breathing room. Like the haunting single "Try To Be", "Day" feels like a moment of both restraint and unity-- Cowan's rippling arpeggios compliment (rather than interrupt) Standell-Preston's crystalline vocals. Blue Hawaii still bloom most vividly when they're working together.
