A bit of advice: If you’ve just listened to the first track off Foxygen‘s debut LP ‘Take The Kids Off Broadway’ and are a bit puzzled, don’t worry! That’s just the band shifting your brain cells around to prepare you for what comes next. ‘Make it Known’ makes Ariel Pink’s ‘Hold On’ sound halfhearted… hell, this song could be our new anthem if we’re not careful.
But that’s probably not what they had in mind. A lot of this duo’s music feels entirely off the cuff, even while sounding like a lot of time was spent on these tracks. Occupying that historical space somewhere between hippie psychedelia like 13th Floor Elevators, and glam rock like Roxy Music/early Bowie, it’s hard to tell what era this music was conceived in – which is the very prerequisite of timeless records. Frankly, this is a band that can’t seem to make up their mind about much of anything, and it’s probably for the best. The twin vocals of songwriting team Sam France and Jonathan Rado seem to switch genre entirely mid-verse or mid-hook, going from a tumult of horns and organs to jangly guitar and back again. Leader-of-the-pack motorcycle rock n’ roll gives way to Shirelles fanfare and viceversa, all fronted by something close to Mick Jagger… it’s retrolicious, through and through.
If all this sounds looney tunes, well… it kinda is. But maybe I’m just being old-fashioned. As Foxygen says themselves: "How could I love someone if I’m not willing to change?" Bedroom production aside, this is the clearest representation of something new I’ve heard in quite some time. – Mike Levine (@Goldnuggets)