Lightheaded’s second LP is an airy, sunny and sweet jangle pop.
Power pop unit Lightheaded are back with Thinking, Dreaming, Scheming! co-released by Slumberland and Skep Wax. It’s the Jersey Shore band’s second LP, following 2024’s Combustible Gems, and takes tracks from their 2023 EP Good Good Great! This record is a mighty fine piece of jangle pop/shoegaze fusion.
Opener “Same Drop” drops into the world of this record beautifully, with twangy, spry guitars and fuzzily relaxed production. A Rilo Kiley-esque riff on the bridge adds a dash of 21st century modernity—like if Kimya Dawson was in the studio with the Beach Boys.
That’s the elevator pitch: this record is doing The Moldy Peaches and Alvvays go to the beach in 1965. It earnestly and awesomely incorporates a tambourine on more than one occasion. “The View From Your Room” features woodwinds and birds chirping in its hazy, breezy illustration of an afternoon in a sunlit room looking out bay windows. It’s power pop made psych-surf; shoegaze if what the artists were looking down at was the wildflowers in a San Francisco park.
It’s also very sweet—potently young and everyday. “Crash Landing of the Clod” features a delayed, lethargic beat and expansive reverb that taken together sound like a school dance—the awkward, heavy shuffling of feet and echo of a school gym. One track is titled “Orange Creamsicle Head.”
Cynthia Rittenbach’s vocals shapeshift from Margo Gunyan to Alvvays, always reserved, even keeled. They leave plenty of spotlight for the chameleonic guitars, which delight in a new way on every single track. On “Mercury Girl” they’re sprightly, quick and metallic; on “Crash Landing” they’re sleepily, nostalgically padded out; on “Orange Creamsicle Head” they’re quaint and 50s pop-adjacent.
Nine tracks of clear skies beg the question of how Lightheaded might handle cloudier weather—and closer “Love Is Overrated” comes just in time. It’s exciting to see a little cynicism from this record. Rittenbach’s lyrics insist on the meaninglessness of it all, but swaying guitars beneath and a singsongy violin riff above undercut her hopelessness. The result is a song that starts shut away in one’s room and then throws open the door and blooms—ultimately exquisitely balancing the sometimes-bleakness of love with the expansive, delicate beauty of life around it.
