Featured Tracks:
The opening track on Cigarettes After Sex’s self-titled first record is a slow-as-molasses alt-rock ballad just en en titled “K.” It chronicles lead singer Greg Gonzalez’s infatuation with a lady known as Kristen, and pinpoints the extremely minute their relationship changes from strictly casual to one thing bigger. “We had made love previously that time, without any strings attached/But i really could inform that one thing had changed,” Gonzalez croons in a voice near to a whisper. And while he appears to have cinched the offer with all the woman under consideration, the track finishes for an evasive note: “Stay with me/I do not desire you to go out of. ”
Kristen’s initial can also be the death knell of contemporary intimate interaction, the wretched abbreviation for “OK,” the text same in principle as rejection by indifference. An extra layer of relevance in 2017 without a doubt, Cigarettes After Sex is an album of love songs, but it’s tempered with a millennial ennui that gives the songs. In the place of counting on lovey-dovey, pastoral words to inform tales of budding relationships, each track is placed to a backdrop of ultra-downbeat fantasy pop music, its somber emotions dripping into fleeting vignettes of sexy iPhone videos and hookups that are bittersweet. The record plays such as a cryptic guidebook to navigating the field of modern love affairs, or the somewhat depressing journal of some twenty-first century Don Juan.
Sonically, Cigarettes After Intercourse is an impressively even-keeled, slowcore collection—so even-keeled that it borders on ambient. It is very easy to compose a lot of slow tracks with comparable chords, nonetheless it’s an entirely various feat to make, mix, and compile them in a fashion that their similarities become their skills, slowly establishing an unshakable mood. Initially the repetition of certain elements—echoing guitars, soft hi-hats, elastic basslines—seems overbearing. But after numerous listens, Cigarettes After Sex’s less-is-more ethos is obvious, and their heady melange of a few genres of subdued indie rock starts to produce more feeling.
The record possesses strong areas of alt-country with its reverberated, plucked guitars and snares that are shuffling instantly bringing in your thoughts teams like Cowboy Junkies and Mojave 3. But then you encounter a track like “Sunsetz,” whose dreamy intro owes a considerable financial obligation to mid-era Cocteau Twins, before dropping just about all instrumentation with its verse to display Gonzalez’s boyish vocals. “Sunsetz” is really so free, sufficient reathereforen for so much area, it’s electric, the emptiness forcing you to focus on Gonzalez’s stark lyrics and clever composition that it should be boring; instead. “So you start your gown and show me your tits/On the move set during the old play ground,” he sings, certainly not as being a demand, but very nearly as a broad observation.
The theme of intimate encounters as fodder for peaceful introspection continues throughout Cigarettes After Intercourse, however it’s delivered this kind of a way that is nonchalant it prevents corniness. “Sweet” starts using the line “Watching the movie me/The one where you’re showering with wet hair dripping,” before turning into a song about longing to touch a loved one’s skin through a screen that you sent. A catchy late-album highlight, “Truly”’s chorus goes, “Truly, understand you really do not need/To be in like to up for it dating have sex in my experience.”
Just like relationships on their own, these tracks are saturated in contradictions. The things of Gonzalez’s desire are both achingly tantalizingly and close far, in the phone plus in their sleep, on their sofa plus in their mind. Through wallowing in its very own mire and being released one other part, Cigarettes After Intercourse becomes some of those restrained, low-boil records where tempo, repetition, and composition that is muted a whole tale inside the pauses between your records as well as the tips involving the lines.
