When Donovan Quinn and Glenn Donaldson of the Skygreen Leopards sing about love, you don’t have to fear for your heart. The California psyche-pop duo’s latest album, Family Crimes, has a triptych of love songs that are gentle enough to only scratch the surface of melancholy. “Love Is a Shadow” shuffles through piles of fallen leaves, with Quinn and Donaldson harmonizing like sun and honey. “Is It Love, Love Love” saunters along, a nugget of cosmic country with an aftertaste of Tang instead of blotter acid. And “It’s Not Love”, the darkest of the three, goes so far as to sketch an ever-so-slightly harrowing scenario on a sheet of squeaky-clean folk-pop: “Too much blood on the water/ Nothing left to say/ It’s not love/ It’s just blood.” It’s alright, ma; they may be only bleeding, but they have a box of Band-Aids handy. The Skygreen Leopards once wrote songs with far more twists and turns. In particular, 2006’s Disciples of California embraced ragged edges, off-the-beat wobble, and an almost aggressive lethargy. That slight yet deliberate rawness is all but gone on Family Crimes; in its place is soft-focus haze that barely conceals the group’s penchant for neat-as-a-pin precision.
Mostly, it works: “WWIII Style” is breathless, studio-apartment pop, with the high notes seemingly sung into a sink. “Reno Wedding” rings and twangs with Byrds-like shimmer as Quinn’s and Donaldson’s voices tumble out of them like bashful apologies. There are regrets embedded in “Crying Green & Purple” and “Mascara Priscilla”—they do both allude to tears, after all—but the clouds are thin and wispy, and they’re blown away as quickly as they gather.
Some of the internal references on Family Crimes feel like hyperlinks. “Leave the Family”—a gorgeous splay of Crayola colors and therapeutic jangle—is later reincarnated as “Leave the Family Reprise”, a sloth-paced coda that acts more as a balm than a parting shot. And when the la-la-la-happy “Josephine” segues into “Mascara Priscilla”, it’s as if they’re flip sides of the same conflicted character. “I’m all right with the Christian life,” goes a line in “Mascara Priscilla”, and the reference to the Byrds’ cover of The Louvin Brothers’ “The Christian Life” feels less like a wink and more like a solemn nod.
Nebulous Christian themes have popped up before in the Skygreen Leopards’ songbook, and Family Crimes is no different. “Suburban Bibles” is so mumbly and bright-eyed, it might as well be a sing-song lullaby for Sunday school naptime. “Selling T-Shirts” even veers into the realm of Jonathan Richman with its chiming strum and the mundane juvenilia of lines like, “Drop me off at the shopping center.” Granted, the phrase “Quaalude rapture” is also bandied about; the pharmaceutical-friendly Skygreen Leopards of old still make their presence known, just more subtly and wryly. Quinn and Donaldson may be getting somewhat longer in the tooth, but they’re sounding younger. And whatever darkness lurks within Family Crimes is swallowed back down with a wise, dreamy smile.
