Poppy- Jangle Rock
Dam Gila, the reworked name of Yawn front man Adam Gil, is a new solo project that capitalizes on the 21st century’s appropriation of jangle-pop. Gila’s debut album So Long Leisure sounds a bit like an overly produced Mac Demarco record, but without any of the eccentric charm.
The songs stick to the inside of the skull like silly putty to wallpaper; while they are easy to shirk off, there remains a similar sort of lingering residue. In true millennial form Leisure blends obnoxiousness with ambient pop guitar, packaging it all under an album cover that features an unshod and shirtless Gil, wearing a wig and holding an acoustic guitar as he looks out apathetically into the glossy distance. If anything, the cover preserves what is most frustrating about Leisure; Gil tries much too hard to be different.
“History,” the album’s most marketable track, unsurprisingly doubles as its best. It sounds the most genuine, and plays with an all right melodic hook rounded out by Coldplayesque background falsettos. It strongly contrasts to “Home Again,” which hides under technological blipping and unwarranted ambience. The song is dense with perpetual loops of background humming, and keen to break into “summery” beach choruses that sound like they were written in a grey recording studio in Chicago.
Everything sounds synthetic for the sake of being synthetic, and Gil- even when belting out vocals within the concern of a lost puppy- sounds much too disinterested to give a damn. It further serves as an accurate index on how the rest of the album plays.
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