I waxed my car over the long weekend and woke up the next day reminded of muscles I’d forgotten I’d had, complaining that they’d been given a task they hadn’t been trained for. Or put another way, I’m sore. The car looks great though.
Today’s review finally breaks the death grip the early nineties have held on the selection recently, returning to the relatively modern times of 2022.
Disc 1738 is…Emotional Creature
Artist: Beach Bunny
Year of Release: 2022
What’s up with the Cover? Dr. Manhattan scores again. I wonder if Beach Bunny lead singer Lili Trifilio minds that Dr. Manhattan might be using his mastery of space and time to lovingly hold the hands and face of innumerable other women simultaneously as he holds hers! Maybe he’s building a glass mansion on Mars as well! That Dr. Manhattan gets around, Lili.
How I Came To Know It: I discovered Beach Bunny through their first full length LP, “Honeymoon” in 2020. “Emotional Creature” is their second, and this was me giving it a go.
How It Stacks Up: I have both of Beach Bunny’s LPs and one of their six EPs (apparently they love EPs). In a moment of whimsy, I have decided that I shall count the one EP in this stacking exercise. The result for “Emotional Creature” is that it falls to #3.
Rating: 2 stars but almost 3
I’d like to describe how Beach Bunny is reinventing the pop rock genre in a way never seen before, but they aren’t doing that. This is middle of the road indie pop music, straight, no chaser. Expect a general four piece of vox, guitar, bass and drums, played a little over the line of “busy” that my clean-production sensibilities don’t usually appreciate but was fine with…this time.
Fortunately, while Beach Bunny aren’t breaking new ground, what they do they do well. The band is tight to the degree that even the noisier bits I wanted to dismiss come off well. You can play dense music, folks, just do it well. It helps that there aren’t a lot of post-production tricks going on here. Beach Bunny is rock and roll through and through, and they wear their garage-band origins on their sleeves.
Don’t expect instant hit hooks a la Olivia Rodrigo or Taylor Swift, but that’s not what Beach Bunny is about. Do expect melodies that refuse to take the easy way out and still come out sounding good. If things feel a bit shouty and overly earnest that’s OK, it is the brashness of youth and we all need an infusion of that once in a while.
Lead singer Lili Trifilio has a deeper and flatter voice than most pop chanteuses and it gives her delivery a punk edge. Still pop at its core, but the punk edge is a welcome element, and combined with the energetic playing of the band, gives the songs oomph. She belts things out at volume 10 as well, managing to avoid sounding shouty in the process. OK, she’s occasionally shouty but it is in moments where a good shout is called for.
Lyrically, I wasn’t inspired the way I was with earlier Beach Bunny albums, and my mind wandered during many of the tunes. It wasn’t a bad wander, but it did relegate large swaths of the record to a background, “indie romance movie score” quality. The band works on adding bits of syncopation in the bridge of a few songs and various other tricks to get you to listen more actively, but for the most part I did not find my attention seized.
When I did pay attention, the songs were what you’d expect from a record called “Emotional Creature” as the tunes are various emotions, and how to struggle through having them. It felt honest throughout, but it didn’t break a lot of new ground.
In the end, while I liked this record, I didn’t get inspired to listen to it again anytime soon. I mostly found myself thinking about how I like my other two Beach Bunny records slightly more. As a result, I will have an amicable parting from this record, and send it along to a hopefully happy home, and look forward to the other offerings this band will provide me somewhere further along in the CD Odyssey journey.
Best tracks: Entropy, Oxygen, Love Song
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