Foxygen – Seeing Other People

A humorless medley of rock styles

For a band like Foxygen, who is known for their troubled career as much as their music, the choice to adopt a disillusioned tone for an album which serves partly as a reflection on their own past seems like the next step in a logical progression. On Seeing Other People, the duo abandons their previous albums’ boisterous, operatic sensibility, instead pursuing one that counts mid-life crises and ‘80s synth-pop among its chief influences. Throughout the album’s thirty-eight minutes, Foxygen offers an uneven and ultimately uninteresting mixture of sober dance music, downcast ballads about relationship failure and forlorn self-reflection.

Over their entire career, Foxygen has been playing musical dress-up, diving into the rock canon to try on the various sounds of their predecessors. They adhere to this approach on Seeing Other People, but make some alterations to their assortment of borrowed styles: Foxygen has lost interest in the psychedelic elements of their previous albums, ostensibly after finding a new appreciation for The Human League and New Order. Bands whose influence is particularly strong on the opener, “Work,” and the seventh track, “News.”

In a more subtle manner, Foxygen also borrows from modern pop; specifically, “Livin’ a Lie” sounds almost like a Drake song (though it would be one of his throwaways). Despite these changes, classic rock impersonations are as abundant as ever. If Bruce Springsteen and Lou Reed (long after the prime of both artists’ careers) had collaborated on a song, it might sound something like “The Thing Is.” Because Foxygen’s sense of humor has mysteriously vanished, though, their thievery no longer sounds playful, and they do not improve upon any of the styles that they mimic.

Despite its shortcomings, there are some memorable moments on Seeing Other People. The album begins strongly with “Work”—the percussion section on this song deserves special recognition—and “Mona,” which is easily the album’s best track. With its slowly-escalating bass line and singer Sam France’s subtly shifting vocal timbres, this is the only truly moving song on the record. After the first two tracks, though, listeners will likely be disappointed by “Seeing Other People,” a bland, repetitive ballad.

The other highlight does not come until “The Conclusion,” the last song on the album, which combines groove-oriented instrumentation with lyrics that consist entirely of variations on the phrase, “I’ve come to the conclusion that we should just be friends.” This minimalism is refreshing, especially since most of France’s lyrics are a bit south of mediocre, with a few truly awful lines—“I gotta face the facts / I’m never gonna dance like James Brown / I’m never gonna be black” (from “Face the Facts”), for example—interspersed throughout.

Listeners who were intrigued by the frenetic, unruly spirit of the duo’s earlier albums will probably be disappointed by Seeing Other People. Foxygen do still sound like themselves, but that doesn’t mean much for a band whose sound is, for the most part, not their own. Granted, most great rock musicians have made a disappointing album at some point, so it stands to reason that the band who imitates them would do the same. Foxygen’s is just worse.