Don't believe the album title, believe the album cover-- while New Young Pony Club's 2007 debut LP Fantastic Playroom may have been prefab, superficial, and sorta garish, it at least gave the impression of being a whole lot of fun. And now here's The Optimist with its Serious Artist design, but really it's just a preview for dance-rock at its most pro forma and drab, a triangulation of Garbage at their most blandly professional, Bloc Party at their least agitated, and Ladytron at their most bored.
At the center of it all is Tahita Bulmer, her deadpan voice previously lauded for conveying a nonchalant carnality on minor hits "Ice Cream" and "The Bomb". Not much has changed on that front, but The Optimist too often gets lost in non-committal melodies as Bulmer tries and tries again to capture quote-worthy elegant wastefulness-- "You got the instinct/ Tell me what's the answer," "We want to/ I don't want to do any of this without you," and the coup de grâce, "Don't look at me now/ Look at my intellect/ The things I leave behind like footsteps."
So much goes into this ice queen guise, and yet the best parts of The Optimist occur when she opens up on the hooks-- "We Want To" has a hands-in-the-air agreeability pulled fresh from the days of mandatory Franz Ferdinand rips, and opener "Lost a Girl" has a kinesis that's notably lacking on the rest of the LP. Memorable passages like these are lost amidst songs that stretch out to five minutes when they should be three, and are constructed nearly the same exact way in nearly the same exact tempo-- there's promise in the syncopated percussion of the title track, but it plods when it should glide, while "Stone" wastes the most intriguing keyboard overdubs by sloppily using them all at once.
In the end, The Optimist isn't just disappointing for people who believed in NYPC, but for people who want to believe in microgenres even when they are clearly not built for the long run. New Young Pony Club weren't nu-rave, blog-house, or French touch, but they didn't need to be-- their maximalist, fashion-forward, club-friendly aesthetic gave them enough philosophical congruence to benefit from the prevailing trends of the time. They seemed positioned as a latter-decade Ladytron, a bastion of aloof cool amidst an otherwise spazzy and day-glo scene. But Ladytron's Witching Hour proved that fantastic art could result from complimenting that facade with inspired songwriting, considered production, and an occasional peek at emotional resonance. Those qualities are absent from The Optimist, an album that pretty much shows NYPC content to ride this aloof cool thing out.
