It's difficult, if not totally impossible at this point, to pry Khaela Maricich from the clutches of 2006, where we last left her minimal pop project with the LP Paper Television. That Maricich proclaims, "We invented love" on "Make It Up", the opening track of the project's new eponymous album, isn't entirely hyperbole; the Blow, comprised of Maricich and collaborator Jona Bechtolt of YACHT from 2004 until the latter's exit and visual artist Melissa Dyne's entrance in 2007, have done their best to capture a certain, adorable shade of affection (see: the relative ubiquity of "Parentheses"). At that moment—only seven years ago, but it feels like a generation in Blow time—the project proved itself a master of a petite, wittily articulate style almost all its own, establishing a four-years-in-the-making identity that, wherever or whenever you heard it, fastened itself to a piece of your life that you may or may not be inclined to revisit just yet.
Now, to meet 2013, the Blow might have traded Olympia's K Records for Brooklyn's Kanine, and Dyne is contributing songwriting and production in addition to her duties as the band's installation artist-in-residence, but they haven't stretched too much farther outside the world Maricich has been carving out for herself since splitting off from the Microphones around the turn of the century. The Blow hopscotches through doubts and fears and mushy lovestuff much like its predecessors, rarely skipping boxes or treading out of bounds. Once again, Maricich's coy lyricism is littered with bite-sized, memorable quips. Her observations about gender ("He wants to talk to you 'cause you're a girl, and he likes girls/ We all like girls/ I flashed my powder-pink handgun and I walked right through"), oft-insecure self-reflection ("I heard a rumor that I was amazing/ I tell myself everything I hear about myself"), and the soullessness of dating without purpose ("A kiss was just something to do with my tongue until you kissed me") are as beguiling as ever, fish-hooking an impatient ear back into a song so structurally simple and almost routine that, upon first listen, it could otherwise glide past as been-there, aughts-era synth twee with ease. Unsurprisingly, two of its shortest, pithiest songs—"I Tell Myself Everything" and "Like Girls"—are its shining moment.
Throughout, Dyne's instrumentation grooves close to the chest, beginning with the irresistible percussive bursts and adding a few embellishments, mostly toward the record's end: the synth-and-vocals stereo experimentation on "The Specter", the otherworldly echo that orbits "Not Dead Yet"'s slow crawl. It's smart, carefully assembled commentary with a blithe score—a Blow record, in other words. Faced with a musical landscape that's increasingly ravenous for growth in leaps and bounds, the consistency after so long is refreshing, even if they make no attempt to remove themselves from their (and our) cute past.
At the same time, that steadfastness often reads as reluctance. Maricich seems aware of this. "I will admit that I fear the future/ or I fear there won't be one at all," she sings on "From the Future". "I can see the future beckoning with its dirty little finger/ When it calls to me, I will follow." She hasn't—or perhaps it simply hasn't rung her yet. It's hard to tell whether staunchly sticking to the script is part of the performance or not; if it is, it does the album too few favors. It's too late in the game for that.
In a recent blog post, Maricich characterized her tween self as "fairly brazen and painfully inhibited," something she says ultimately motivated her as a performer later in life; even after all this time, those are often The Blow's qualities, too. Hesitation strings the album along a bit, loosening it so it rambles collectively, despite each song's precise individual character. "Make It Up" is a perfect reintroduction to the band's signature bop, and while ending on "Not Dead Yet" probably would've left a stronger impression than successor "You're My Light", they are a strong dual finale nonetheless. This, it seems, is where 2006 catches up with the Blow: Where these songs once demanded a whole lot of Northwestern indie-boom attention with their coy appraisals (both inward and outward), in today's context they tend to melt backwards, into the songs we already know. Dreamy respites are quite difficult to inhabit for long.
