While the Brooklyn-based trio Au Revoir Simone's synth-pop is always simple, elegant, and ethereal, it's expressed in two distinct modes which approximately divide the album. The first is musically fanciful and lyrically Pollyannaish, and it dominates the first half of the album and makes good on the promises implicit in its title. On "Through the Backyards", a swaying keyboard melody and subtle twitters ride pneumatically hissing percussion. Band members Heather D'Angelo, Erika Forster, and Annie Hart breathe out dulcet harmonies over the rigid rhythm of the music, rhapsodizing about cherry trees and declaring that you can "just make a wish and everything comes true." The drum machines on "Hurricanes" pop and trill beneath bright keyboards until canned applause segues into a jaunty Charlie Brown piano. The vocal melody and the didactic platitudes it contains are remindful of Kimya Dawson: "Dreaming takes you where you want to be/ Don't follow the status quo/ Picture where you'd like go." It's not realistic, but it's not supposed to be -- it's encouragement, the anti-synth-pop to the Moldy Peaches anti-folk, without the schmaltzy affectations.
In the record's second half, a contrary mood takes over-- Au Revoir Simone are still concerned with romance, but they shed their bubbly pep for a dark, cool menace. "Back in Time" announces this shift with an insistently pulsing drum and dreamy synths that billow up in clouds, shot through with a mournful bleat. It's still sprightly but murkier and less obvious than the preceding tracks, the soundtrack to a crisis of faith. If the album's first half is imbued with a summery sense of hope and good cheer, it's starting to feel a bit threadbare by "The Winter Song", the way a sunny sky looks thin and provisional in winter. By the time it peters out into the windblown barrenness that inaugurates "And Sleep Al Mar", it's as if seasonal affective disorder had taken over in earnest. The song throbs with the ominous swing of Air's Virgin Suicides score and stately piano figures as the trio murmurs discomfiting come-ons: "Teenage Mexican boy/ Don't be shy/ ‘Cause I could listen to Spanish all night."
The album feels bifurcated in a way that's not unsatisfying, but Au Revoir Simone is at their best when they manage to embody whimsy and realism within a single track on "Where You Go". For the most part, it's the usual volley of basic piano phrases and cascading synths; dreamy chirps of "where you go is where I want to be." But near the end, it collapses into a sleek minor key bounce that echoes the lyrical turn from naiveté to a more sophisticated (i.e. jaded) view of romance: "It was late at night, I met you at a party / It was a crowded room, I couldn't hear you talking / You tried to hold my hand and then you left without me." The synths on final track "Stay Golden" percolate with restrained urgency, and amid their tight swirl, a sentiment rings out that sounds like the mature Au Revoir Simone of the record's back half rebuking the green one of the front half: "Your faith was an illusion." Luckily, if that gets you down, you're welcome to let the album spin back to the first song and start building the pretty illusion again.
