The release of New York indie rock quartet LVL UP’s latest album Return to Love hinged on an ultimatum. After years toiling as linchpins in the city’s DIY scene, playing in a half dozen other scummy pop acts, and with half of the band running the small but influential label Double Double Whammy, they decided that they'd had enough. The rock project that Dave Benton and Mike Caridi launched with their college buds—drummer Greg Rutkin and bassist/singer Nick Corbo—would either have to get good enough to draw the attention of a bigger indie label (“Sub Pop, Merge, or Matador,” they said in a recent interview) or call it quits entirely.
As chance would have it, some Sub Pop employees caught a couple shows in the wake of the band’s cult-beloved 2014 record Hoodwink’d and decided to release their new album Return to Love. But happy endings aside, it’s hard not to read that do-or-die period into the relatable agitation of this record. For the first time, the trio of songwriters’ lyrics largely deal with existential turmoils rather than interpersonal ones. It’s as if the possibility of the band ending—or maybe just getting older—forced them to stop and think about bigger themes, to look at the sky and anxiously sputter what they see.
On album opener “Hidden Driver,” Benton meditates on the Biblical fall of man and the nature of God. Corbo considers the meaning of life while telling a creation myth of sorts on the closer “Naked in the River With the Creator.” Caridi processes a loved one’s trauma on “Pain” and offers the line, “I hope you grow old/And never find love” as both a withering send-off and a crippling suggestion that under the circumstances, nothing you can say will ever be enough. These are mammoth questions, the sorts of things that theologians, philosophers, and ethicists spend their whole lives puzzling over. And the decision to confront them, especially without offering easy answers, gives Return to Love a weight that past LVL UP efforts lacked.
The record’s also pushed forward by their three-songwriter lineup. Though their voices are sometimes hard to distinguish—particularly Corbo’s throaty mumble and Benton’s pinched moan—there’s a change in spirit between each one that lends a delightfully erratic energy to the whole effort. On the record’s B-side, Benton opens with the plodding “The Closing Door” before sulking through two of Corbo’s observational downers and then rapidly ratches the energy back up on Caridi’s “I,” which is as perilously caffeinated as anything in Royal Headache’s catalog. Hoodwink’d was a bit more unified both in tempo and tone, but the unhinged style works in favor of these songs. They’re singing about uncomfortable questions, it’s only fitting that the music should follow.
The general shape of Return to Love is familiar. Like the band’s earliest albums, it’s largely a guitar, bass, and drums-driven rock record that mines its song structures from the gold soundz of ’90s indie rock and their peers in the contemporary Northeastern indie rock scene. Even this agitated and disjointed album of existential bummer jams that follows a beloved pop album has precedents—think Dinosaur Jr.’s paranoid Bug after You’re Living All Over Me or Pavement’s Wowee Zowee after Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain. But that’s part of what makes *Return to Love *so comforting, so satisfyingly unsatisfied. There’s a sense of possibility in the desperation. They’re just the latest to move these pieces around—to use distortion pedals and droning vocals to unpack the mysteries of the universe. But there’s a confidence that with time they could be the ones to finally solve the puzzle.
