Name yr band Carbon Difoxide, and we’ll talk…
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Jonathan Bradley: Foxygen’s “San Francisco” arrives with flowers already in hair, and with such conviction that it’s tough to believe there’s not some vaguely parodic intention hidden amidst the wispy music-box melodies. At least The Magnetic Fields (with “Come Back From San Francisco”) and The Lucksmiths (“The Chapter in Your Life Entitled San Francisco”) afforded the town some bitter to go along with the sugar-sweet. But Foxygen’s avowed commitment to its folksy Haight-Ashbury subject matter works in the band’s favor, with the doughy drum machine and twinkling arrangement assembled sincerely enough to make the lyric “I left my love in San Francisco” almost sound something other than gormless. It helps that the backing vocals dispel the mooniest lines’ whimsies about eyes being like a cup of tea: “That’s OK; I was bored anyway.”
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Alfred Soto: Forget the lacquered arrangement: the voice is so lint-free that I knew it had to be about California.
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Katherine St Asaph: Fuck California, you made me reuse this.
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Jer Fairall: Every bit as cloying as the standard MGMT joint, to which this annoyingly-monikered (however appropriately so) lot add a layer of back-patting superiority: listen and I’m sure that you can make out the snickers behind the fey vocals and Tony Bennett quotes. Listen harder and I’m even more sure that you can hear me shouting a hearty “FUCK YOU” in the direction of the NPR studio they’re inevitably playing this in at any moment now.
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Ian Mathers: THEIR NAME IS FOXYGEN.
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Anthony Easton: If this were on one of those pseudo-Nuggets comps, it might have been considered a pop-psych classic, and because I have a soft spot for both that kind of music and for twee, this kind of hits the sweet tooth. I can understand completely, though, how people might absolutely hate it. One extra point for the weird Jesusy bit.
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Brad Shoup: It’s like one of those Odessey and Oracle tracks I always skip.
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Will Adams: Why are there no thesaurus entries for “pleasant but boring?” 🙁
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Patrick St. Michel: Kids, you can listen to better rock music from the ’60s and ’70s on Spotify. Don’t settle for some blog-approved hucksters who hope a few well-timed nudges to the rib will make them something more than derivative.
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Iain Mew: The guest vocals that drolly respond to the chorus (by Jessie Baylin and/or Sarah Versprille, best I can tell) are key to what would otherwise be a pretty but dusty bit of period twee. I can’t even work out what “that’s OK, I was born in LA” means — SF is close enough to LA? LA is like a field? A field is better than LA? — but that very fact is a spark of life. It gives a space for something other than cozy familiarity that lends an extra edge to other bits of the song like the spirals of melody below Sam France singing “then you fell into the well”.
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Crystal Leww: This sounds like a million influences and absolutely nothing new or inspired.
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Scott Mildenhall: It’s definitely trying to sell something — a mobile phone contract, maybe? Some kind of vaguely “homely” product in an ad centred around the busy lives of An Everyday Family? Actually, no, the clear inspiration for this song is the televisual plague that was the “I like old movies” match.com advert from a few years back. It’s not considered the best one, but that’s just because it was terrible. Spoiler alert for anyone reading this outside the UK: Foxygen’s next single will be the in-no-way-creepy “Girl On The Platform Smiles“.
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