The New York duo MS MR resembles a pop-art design firm, a partnership of sorts that happens to offer pop music among other holdings. Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow met as Vassar students, after Plapinger started the label Neon Gold as a thesis project. They rolled out the Candy Bar Creep Show EP on Tumblr in 2012, and their followup debut Secondhand Rapture came with "visual treatments" for all of its songs. Their song titles often feel like songwriting-workshop prompts ("Dark Doo Wop"). Like Marina and the Diamonds, MS MR offer pop that strives to hit its marks and offer something further: the viral hit and reactionary think piece about it, all in one.
How Does It Feel is their second full-length album, and the larger sense that they’re a smartly conceived rollout plan in search of indelible songs has never really stopped dogging them. They seemed interesting in 2012, and they seem interesting in 2015. But the songs don’t speak the same subversive and interesting language of their publicity. Plapinger is a powerful singer, someone who very much sounds like she belongs perched on footlights. But the aesthetics of her songs with Hershenow remain timid and careful: There are no mind-warping sounds to match the visual boldness of their videos, and none of Plapinger’s lyrics have the crisp, memorable economy of her album and song titles. If pop art traffics first in unforgettable iconography, then MS MR fail the basic test: You could be listening to other people when you are listening to MS MR, and it’s often easy to imagine that you are.
If there are no calling-card songs here here, there are several solid ones: "Painted" turns Plapinger’s tense, brittle recitation of the words "What did he think would happen" into a rhythmic tattoo. The song seems to be accelerating slightly for its entire length, obsessive irritation gathering force. On "No Guilt in Pleasure" (another one of those mission-statement style song titles), tiny thumb pianos share space with tarmac-sized synths, while Plapinger dips into the throaty, throbbing lower end of her register. In general, MS MR have a much better feel for "small, tense, and interesting" than they do for "big and soaring"—the verses crackle with friction and ideas, while the choruses taste generic. When "No Guilt in Pleasure" and "Wrong Victory" scale up into their Big Hooks, the flavor drains out of the music as the volume builds.
Plapinger’s lyrics also often clunk where they should soar. The synth-pop "Tunnels" builds a cool and autumnal atmosphere, but Plapinger trips through it with wordy lines like "Silence and motion on this quiet tread/ Searching for lanes that don’t lead to the end." They are conversational in a way that fights the basic impulse of pop lyrics, which is to distill emotions to a fine point. You can usually hear the semicolons in Plapinger’s lyrics, which struggle to wedge layered impressions and fleeting thoughts into the stark, four-color backdrops of the music. This is often a problem when you approach a genre—in MS MR’s case, pop music—with the stated intention of subverting or commenting on it. Genre writing is a complex enough game all by itself. Unless you are blessed with some illuminating thunderclap of genius, your efforts to "subvert" those tropes usually just renders them inert.
