“Can you say Sellout The Man?” griped one fan in a YouTube review of Portugal. The Man’s latest album, one of a handful compiled for posterity by the band themselves in a supercut of their own bad reviews. It’s a criticism the band had clearly braced for. Months before Woodstock’s release, they pre-butted that attack with shirts reading, in all caps, “I Liked Portugal. The Man Before They Sold Out.” Even without that caps-locked heads up, the band’s embrace of modern-rock glitz and EDM bombast shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. The Alaska psych-pop group had been telegraphing their commercial ambitions for years, first by signing to Atlantic for 2011’s In the Mountain in the Cloud and then by partnering with Danger Mouse on 2013’s streamlined Evil Friends. Those aren’t things bands do when they’re hoping to stay under the radar.
Evil Friends was too little distinguished from any other album with Danger Mouse on it to move the needle much. With Woodstock, however, Portugal. The Man have finally made good on whatever latent commercial potential Atlantic saw in them. The band topped the alternative charts this summer with the single “Feel It Still,” a shimmying throwback built from borrowed pieces of the Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” with more than a little inspiration from Pharrell’s “Happy,” and that peppy breakout track is no fluke. Recorded with an expanded cast of studio hands including familiar faces like John Hill, one of Santigold’s ace producers, and Danger Mouse—who returns for three tracks, one of which features a Gorillaz-style cameo from Fat Lip of the Pharcyde—Woodstock is sharper, catchier, and craftier than its predecessor. If it’s a shameless sellout record, it’s an effective one.
Still, for fans who enjoyed the band’s messier edges, Woodstock’s origins make it hard not to fantasize about the album that might have been. In a significant departure for a band that fired off their first eight albums at a one-a-year clip without overthinking them, they spent years working with the Beastie Boys’ Mike D on a sprawling, nearly completed record titled Gloomin + Doomin before scrapping it for this one. The inspiration for their course correction, frontman John Gourley has explained repeatedly, was a speed-it-up pep talk from his father and the discovery of his dad’s old Woodstock ticket stub, which he says triggered the band’s desire to make a more charged record that spoke to the times.
Maybe the album would have hung together better if he’d never found that stub, because it’s in the band’s often clumsy attempts at topicality that the record stumbles. There’s always been a disconnect between how Portugal. The Man seem to view themselves—as a fearless, boundary-defying psych band—and how the outside world sees them, as a kind of cute indie act that doesn’t usually demand very much of listeners. The disconnect between those perceptions has never been greater than when Woodstock strives for importance. “Number One” opens the album with an actual recording from the festival—and, uncomfortably, not just any recording, but Richie Havens’ impassioned riff on “Freedom.” Blues artist Son Little sings an interpolation of the chorus, which defuses a little of the queasiness of a white band appropriating a spiritual, but stripped of its context those pained words become just another slogan, one of many the band recites with little tact or consideration. Again and again, Woodstock promises a protest but delivers a party.
That empty sloganeering weighs down even the album’s breeziest songs. Closer “Noise Pollution” is the only Mike D production that made Woodstock’s final cut, and between its nutty space-funk beat and spirited guest vocals from fellow honorary Handsome Boy Modeling School graduate Mary Elizabeth Winstead, it’s an animated homage to the post-genre bohemia of Grand Royal’s glory days. But Gourley pastes together his chorus almost entirely from bumper sticker catchphrases: “I know my rights, je t’aime Paris/Live or die like c’est la vie/With my fist in the air, Je suis Charlie/Can’t ya see I’m feeling magnifique?” That he glides past a reference to the Charlie Hebdo massacre and follows it with a line about feeling great shows how little he’s sweating the details with his righteous dissident act. “I’m a rebel just for kicks now,” Gourley sings on “Feel It Still.” He’s got the kicks part down, the rebellion part less so.
