Flamboyant, Piano-Backed Psychedelic Pop

Upbeat, piano-driven and insistently melodic, British musician Oscar Lang’s newest album could be the soundtrack to a musical. Despite the flamboyant sound of Look Now, the content of its hypothetical jukebox musical may be darker than the songs’ melodies would indicate. On closer examination of the lyrics, it’s clear that Look Now is a breakup album – nearly every song discusses Lang’s heartbreak and despair, his desire to return to his past love, his past life. While putting dark lyrics over a lighthearted melody can sometimes express the glib numbness that often comes with loss, crying from behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, this contrast often feels less like a deliberate choice and more like an unfortunate clash.

Oscar Lang has found viral success in the past, with songs such as “She Likes Another Boy” and “Fall into You” racking up tens of millions of listens on streaming platforms. These songs are typically echoey, psychedelic indie pop, set to soft piano. While Lang has kept the base elements of this sound in Look Now, the new album feels sonically fuller than his older music – for better or worse. It’s hard to summarize everything going on in Look Now. From the first track, “A Song About Me,” listeners are hit with everything from a helium-affect vocal backtrack to ’90s balladic piano to synthy violin effects to a clatter of noise at the end of the song, like a rock fadeout played without the instrumentation. Each element is a lot to take in on its own and even more overwhelming when combined with the others.

The opening track collapses into “Everything Unspoken,” filled with wobbly little melody lines that weave and wriggle together under Lang’s personable indie vocals and transitions into “Crawl,” an Elton John adjacent piano ballad with a carnival music flair, hitting a strange medium between experimental and just plain silly. All are interesting listens, but none recapture the magic of Lang’s previous work.

This is a common theme throughout the album: the music is intricately produced and certainly interesting to listen to, but comes across as a little unsure of itself. Look Now tries to be many things, not the least of which is a breakup album. On the rare occasion that a song’s sound fits with its lyrical content, such as in the nostalgic, stripped down “Leave Me Alone,” listeners may be left wondering why the rest of the album has to be so overly complicated, losing its meaning in layer after layer of instrumentation.

Most of the album’s stronger songs were simpler, from the acoustic guitar-grounded bittersweetness of “One Foot First” to the low piano notes and wavery, intimate vocals of “When You Were A Child,” a track with a Bon Iver flair to its chord progressions. Sadly, these songs are all but lost within the second half of the album, the new-age “Circle Line” kicking off a string of Christmassy piano ballads. The lack of grit behind Lang’s attempts at bitter nostalgia lands much of his music in holiday standard territory, backed by violin effects and harmonies that fall just shy of choral. 

While full of interesting sonic choices, Oscar Lang’s newest album is also rich with confusing ones, losing itself between camp and authenticity. Look Now isn’t a breakup album to cry to, but the lyrical content kills its merit as a silly, flamboyant psychedelic pop album. The best advice listeners can take is to imagine spotlights and feather boas and let their qualms fall to the wayside.