Greg Gonzalez’s hushed vocals floating over lush, reverb-heavy guitar, and a hazy dream pop-scape that’s nothing in need of hypnotic. Cigarettes After Intercourse haven’t deviated from their acquainted sound with X’s, delivering one other set of songs that roughly might match on any of their earlier albums.
X’s focuses on the arc of 1 love story from its shiny beginnings within the first half of the album to the melancholic retrospection of all of it within the second half. The imaginative and prescient appears extra targeted right here than with earlier efforts, as Gonzalez continues to craft songs like a soundtrack for a movie, solely this time the imagistic terrain turns into a sequence of scenes full of bittersweet recollections of every stage of that longer relationship — one which didn’t final however is represented within the bittersweet reflection after the actual fact.
Gonzalez’s work is indebted to the neo-noir of David Lynch’s surreal melodrama Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. Identical to Julee Cruise, who sang her eventual hit “Falling” in one of many first episodes of Twin Peaks, and whose 1989 album, Floating Into the Night time, turned an indicator of dream pop, Cigarettes After Intercourse proceed that legacy to some extent. It’s simple to think about the band acting at one of many bars within the present, simply as Julee Cruise did, or not less than changing into the soundtrack to a steamy meet-up between James Hurley and Donna Hayward.
Gonzalez’s songs are, at their coronary heart, massive pop songs with catchy choruses, wrapped in his dreamy, noir aesthetic, simply as they’ve all the time been. Nevertheless, songs like “Tejano Blue” and “Ambien Slide” are extra deliberately layered with drums which are a refined nod to the Tejano music of El Paso, Texas, the place Gonzalez grew up, particularly set to a repetitive hi-hat and kick drum cascara beat, solely method slowed down in true CAS vogue.
Greg Gonzalez writes from a diaristic place of honesty, particularly concerning the intimacy behind closed bed room doorways, and at one level, he termed his songs as “erotic lullabies,” solely this time round, all of it appears to be toned down – and maybe for the higher. The lyrics, particularly the extra specific ones, are void of the extra overtly (typically objectifying) erotic materials present in earlier recordings (see “Kiss It off Me” and “Hentai” from Cry, or “Younger & Dumb from their debut). As an alternative, Gonzalez focuses on an unravelling relationship, and the tender, fleeting pictures of infatuation and eventual heartbreak that hover like ghosts in every music. Lyrically, “Tejano Blue” comprises Gonzalez’s brash distinction of the suggestive combined with the sentimental, as with many tracks from earlier work (“We wished to fuck with actual love / wished it candy, so pure and heat” adopted by “We wished to fuck like on a regular basis / and once you received again out of your flight / it was the very first thing we did”) . “Child Blue Film” is a reference to Canadian softcore grownup movies from the 70s, and actually, it looks as if Gonzalez has all the time been involved with making a type of child blue film inside the confines of pop music.
The band doesn’t deviate from their sound, much like different dream pop acts like Seaside Home, however as an alternative proceed to refine their imaginative and prescient with extra readability, greater baselines, and a continued promise to envelop you of their hazy, romantic pop noir. It’s that sort of consistency that followers have come to anticipate; nonetheless, one can’t assist however surprise what number of extra releases Cigarettes After Intercourse will maintain this sound earlier than they danger consistency for experimentation inside their inventive boundaries.
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