When you name your band Portugal. The Man (punctuation purposeful), you relegate any music you release under such a moniker to "conceptual" status by default. Whether a self-fulfilling prophecy or the product of title-driven priming, then, this Portland by way of Alaska band has now released four albums and four EPs of ambitious yet friendly, pristine and proggish indie pop since 2006. 2007's 10-track EP It's Complicated Being a Wizard, for instance, opened with a 23-minute opus, followed by that same piece broken up into nine sections. Accessibility and a vague gloss of concept comprise The Satanic Satanist, on which the band, already tailor-cut for indie approval, seems to throw everything on the table to make a groovy album with wide appeal.
Satanist isn't necessarily thrilling, but within the tighter parameters the band set for itself, the group has succeeded at making a good-old-fashioned classic rock record. Song lengths stay around the three-minute mark, the production quality gleams, every hook feels anthemic, and the whole thing is permeated by themes of nostalgia, nature, and togetherness (man). I could dive into the lyrics and try to delineate some sort of binding narrative to the work, but the album doesn't seem to want me to (nor do you). The best quality of Satanist is that everything sits right on the surface, from the opening rally cry of "People Say" ("What a lovely day yeah we won the war/ May have lost a million men, but we got a million more") through the hyperactive bongo/wah-wah work on "Lovers in Love" and the would-be hippie anthems "Everyone is Golden" and "The Sun" ("we are all just lovers"!). Binding the whole piece more than even the cross-faded tracks is the limber, occasionally awesome voice of singer-songwriter John Baldwin Gourley, which can hop north into a crystal falsetto, or drop down into a soulful moan at a second's notice.
While the deal Portugal. The Man made with Satanist doesen't quite qualify as a Pyrrhic victory, it does raise an important, evergreen question about sacrifices. Compromises, more specifically: the sort that bands now and then make with the goal of accessing more ears. Is it better to release more "challenging" music and risk remaining largely unknown, or strive toward "pop" record, maybe gain a few new fans, but risk sacrificing a lot of what makes your band unique? These guys have balanced eccentricity and pop savvy since they started, and Satanist is the first record where it seems they've thrown their weight toward the latter. And while it's certainly enjoyable, it's also a bit more generic than anything they've done before. Maybe their own philosophy can be used to explain my point better: If, as they assert, "Everyone Is Golden", doesn't that sort of devalue gold?
