Indie Lounge Music

Nostalgia drenched alternative rock is an old hat in 2014, and a microgenre that many musicians are willing to plug in their electric guitars for. With the recent success and widespread appeal of big name outfits such as Real Estate and Mac Demarco, it seems that popular indie music gravitates towards sadness in lyricism and instrumentation while at the same time maintaining a catchy personality, which is not necessarily a bad thing.

Matt Kivel of the indie pop group Princeton is the newest artist to give this style a try on his second solo release Days of Being Wild, abandoning the Vampire Weekened-esque characteristics of his current band in favor of mellow electric and acoustic tunes. It would seem that, in theory, Kivel could easily draw upon his more upbeat influences and infuse this instrumentality with a sense of sobriety for the perfect blend of catchiness and seriousness. This is, unfortunately, not the case on his newest release.

Matt Kivel’s Days of Being Wild fails to be something truly memorable; it falls within an amicable middle ground as something thoroughly vanilla. Kivel’s songs lack the catchiness of his more popular indie rock outfit and are without the depth of being something to be taken seriously. Most of Being Wild comes across as agreeable lounge music for an “up and coming” restaurant in the sense that his intent is earnest and his sound is kind of unique, but his end result is just lackluster. Kivel’s stripped down tracks that feature only his voice and light guitar such as “Only with the Wine” and “Blonde Boy” are the only real accomplishments of the release, as their earnestness combined with Kivel’s raw vox create something actually memorable. Besides these two tracks, however, there’s not much there.

Navigating new ground is a difficult thing for most artists, and its hard to really fault Kivel for attempting a type of music that is more or less diametrically opposed to his own indie pop. That being said, listeners can pass on this release.