Before MS MR had written a song, the band already knew how they would initially release their music, conceiving a Tumblr rollout strategy complex enough that Wired first reported it. The project was originally the idea of Lizzy Plapinger, co-founder of boutique NYC pop label Neon Gold, and it was consummated when she started working with producer Max Hershenow. After putting out a few singles under the guise of anonymity, they made music to fit the Tumblr plan in the form of 2012’s Candy Bar Creep Show EP. They put out one song a week, alongside “obsessively curated” images and remix stems.
In his review of Charli XCX’s debut, True Romance, Marc Hogan called for a moratorium on treating internet platforms as musical genres, and rightly so. But even as MS MR break their umbilical connection to Tumblr to release their full-length debut album, they’ve supplemented Secondhand Rapture with what they’re calling “Secondhand Captures”-- a different visual treatment for every song available online; made up of videos of eerie, wretched glamor and corruptible, all-American innocence. MS MR’s desire to give their music a visual analog is interesting, but you wonder about their ability to create a record that can be listened to on its own.
“We both get off on wild weather and write our best music when there’s something crazy happening in the air,” MS MR have said; fittingly, much of Secondhand Rapture revolves around deep, thunderous rumblings, celestial twinkling, foggy shrouds, and the sweet clarity of a pastel dawn. There are brooding, rhythmically strong pop songs that fall halfway between the poutiness of Lana Del Rey and the hyperactive fizz of HAIM. The parts where it deviates from that template, however, are baffling: most notably "Salty Sweet", which has an airy, pumping Middle Eastern-sounding riff, and “Head Is Not My Home”, which revolves around what sounds like a programmed banjo sample. They fit awkwardly amidst the rest of the record.
Plapinger has spoken about not feeling confident about her ability as a lyricist, which works for and against them. At her best, as on the wounded trip-hop-leaning “Hurricane”, she conveys the air of a girl in her mid-to-late teens feeling disillusionment for the first time, mistrustful of herself and others. Songs like “Dark Doo Wop” and “Think of You” make triumphant hooks out of single lines ("Baby, you should stick around” and “I still think of you and all the shit you put me through” respectively, and conversely), the latter in a hi-NRG springy chorus that sticks out like a showgirl in a convent among its plain verses. But elsewhere, as on the rumbling, pastel synth-swathed “Bones”, the words come over as thin and contrived.
The “secondhand” part of the title, the band say, is a reference to how many of our experiences are mediated through the internet rather than direct contact. It’s a concern shared by many of the current class; Drake is terrified of Tumblr, Savages want to smash through mediating devices to live in a present, burning now. MS MR, however, make no attempt to engage with or bristle against the idea, merely representing it. Just as their early release strategy predated the existence of the music itself, these songs play like the moodboard for an actual album, a pitch for the idea of a pop band, rather than one you’d set up a fuckyeah… Tumblr for. MS MR do have one, but it hasn’t been updated in 10 months. It’s all well and good having a pristine launch strategy, but it means nothing if you can’t follow it with something that invites genuine engagement.
