A missive from pre-2016…
[Video]
[6.00]
Ian Mathers: Leverage Models’ first record was already off-kilter, but Whites (finished before the last US Presidential election, shelved partly in reaction to it, and released in 2018 still in reaction to it) is so in the kind of way that seems like it could lurch into an explosion at any given moment. Shannon Fields and Alena Spanger both sing sweetly, often with panic coating their voices, through machines and the music shifts and lurches beneath them, irruptions of light, Joseph Shabason’s saxophone, and things crashing to the ground at intervals. It feels pre- or mid-apocalyptic in exactly the way that 2018 can feel, so much so that it might have seemed nightmarish in a different way back when it was first made (whereas now “this is not our protest, this is just the end of progress” feels like an appropriately guarded assessment). That doesn’t mean there aren’t small moments of humane resilience scattered throughout (and elsewhere on Whites, coffee made on hotplates, ramen eaten in hallways); hell, I’d argue most or all of Fields’s work is a kind of love song to humanity as we’re all in the middle of being eaten alive. But it’s also, in its sometimes chaotic vitality, music for being as mad and as scared as hell, and furthermore, for doing something more than just observing the world.
[10]
Alfred Soto: The synths and electronic vocals do their best to wrap tinsel around a song about expressing yourself when words fail, and Leverage Models for the most part succeed even when sections threaten to veer into nostalgia for 2010-era Foster the People.
[6]
Juana Giaimo: “Senators” starts as a shy song that reminds me of The Postal Servce, but it soon starts growing with a deep darkness that is creepy and at the same time a bit sensitive. Unfortunately, it then goes back to the quieter verses and never recovers that power of the first chorus.
[7]
Juan F. Carruyo: A very scary track that sounds like the music of a dystopian future where humanity is forced to go underground.
[5]
Jonathan Bradley: “Senators” is etched in such fine detail that its patters and textures could be miniaturized again and again until they’ve vanished entirely.
[5]
Joshua Minsoo Kim: A hodgepodge of ideas that sound bad on paper and in practice. It’s not straightforward enough to sound like a typical pop song, so I’m forced to reflect on what the lyrics are trying to convey. In doing so, I find its timely yet oblique message to be bogged down by unsavory theatrics. Most frustrating is the excessive vocal-processing, ultimately failing to capture anything resembling dread or resilience or confusion. I admire the ambition of “Senators,” but it just doesn’t come together coherently.
[3]
Vikram Joseph: It’s hard to get to grips with “Senators.” By turns serene and high-strung, disarmingly mundane and obliquely socio-political, it’s an intriguing shape-shifter of a song which nonetheless manages to pack a memorable punch in the chorus; you probably won’t sing along to “you’re a measuring tool, an instrument for shaking down a government in turmoil,” but the skittish beats and deceptive melodicism will probably stalk your brain; it brings to mind Ryan Hemsworth, maybe, or an anti-romantic second Postal Service album. Is this “measuring tool” the same person he talks about eating “ramen in the hallway” with? I mean, who knows. As a lyrics person, I feel conflicted here — lines like “I feel the Gulf Stream/high on that kind of mid-morning sunlight/the kind of light that sells a lie” jump out to me (not to mention emotional jabs like “Do I remind you of your Dad?”), but when something is so wilfully tangential and conceptually nebulous it’s hard to fully engage with it.
[6]