Photo of Saint Motel by Oswaldo Cepeda
First Thought Fridays is a (mostly) weekly column offering quick-hit takes on some of the albums released this week, serving up first impressions, favorite or least favorite songs, and whether or not they’re worth a second listen. Check back for more each Friday night or Saturday morning.
The school district saw fit to give my kids this random Friday off, which made my time a little more limited than a typical week. As a result, this column is a little later (First Thought Fridays on a Saturday afternoon, why not!) and a little shorter than normal. (And next week’s will be too, for the same reason…how many days off do these kids need?!) Three albums this week, by sheer coincidence all ten songs long and all featuring heavy use of the violin. Here are my thoughts for the week:
Saint Motel, Afterglow (OnThe Records): Saint Motel feel like they should be one of the biggest bands in the world. Their songs are just so effervescent, so catchy in a way that’s timeless and yet so modern and of this moment, so complexly arranged and yet so accessible, and they manage to sound like absolutely no one else but themselves. That’s not to say they’re completely unknown—songs like “My Type,” “Cold, Cold Man,” “Move,” and “Van Horn” have caught some decent airplay—but their appeal is so broad that it feels weird that they’re still “just” an indie rock band. Afterglow probably won’t be the album that breaks them through to a mass audience—if anything, it’s artier than anything they’ve ever done before. But fortunately, it does happen to be really, really good.
Afterglow was also a bit of a surprise. On Valentine’s Day of this year, Saint Motel returned with their first album in four years, Saint Motel and the Symphony in the Sky, an album that, as the name implies, introduced symphonic elements to the Saint Motel sound. The change wasn’t drastic—Saint Motel songs tend to have fairly ornate arrangements already, so the shift from, say, synths to strings just gave slightly different seasoning to the delicious dish the band so consistently serves. Then in September, the band announced that “What started as a ‘maybe one or two bonus songs’ for Symphony in the Sky spiraled into something far wilder: a whole new album.”
Despite following its predecessor by just eight months, Afterglow is not simply Symphony in the Sky Redux but rather its own entirely new animal. The band describes the album as “euphoric, widescreen pop” but the first three songs are the most euphoric songs splashed on the widest screen the band has yet explored—they’re anthemic, massive-sounding, and piano-driven, like the stadium-filling sound of Coldplay or Keane baked in the sun of Saint Motel’s native southern California. Nathaniel Wolkstein’s strings are no longer just adding color to the songs, they’re as integral as the strings in any ELO song, and as prominent an element in the mix as singer A/J Jackson’s voice is.
Not all of the songs aim to be so huge, though, and the lighter moments in the middle of the album are my favorites. “Let Me Down Gently” is downright McCartneyesque in its simple pop pleasures. On “Free Refills,” bassist Dak Lerdmornpong and drummer Greg Erwin lock into a pumping disco rhythm while the fluttering orchestral elements transform the proceedings into what may as well be a Barry White song. “Can I Paint You” is a nice callback to the band’s 2016 track “For Elise,” this time namedropping famous painters instead of famous muses. And Jackson hits a French pop note with the organ groove on “Divine,” accented with glistening harp and fluttering flute.
Afterglow is a reinvention of Saint Motel’s sound without changing them enough to be unrecognizable. There’s no obvious radio single, but man, is it a lot of fun to listen to, and a strong addition to their already strong catalog. Will I listen again?: Hell yeah.
The Telephone Numbers, Scarecrow II (Slumberland): The Telephone Numbers hail from San Francisco, but their new album promised “deep Minneapolis and Athens vibes” and man, does it deliver. Singer-guitarist Thomas Rubenstein has more than a little of Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner in him, both in his singing voice and his songwriting style, while the lead guitars chime over the top, Peter Buck-style. The jangly “Ebb Tide” is a highlight, as is “This Job Is Killing Me,” an ode to the pains of being in a band (“Do leather pants make the band/ Or make it hard to stand?”) that feels a little like Get Up Kid Matthew Pryor when he puts on his New Amsterdams hat. The slow songs are a bit of a wash—“Falling Dream” is pretty blah, while the violin on “Hemlock” appeals a bit more. The Telephone Numbers lineup is Rubenstein and a collective of people from other Bay Area bands, the most prominent being Morgan Stanley of The Umbrellas. She takes over lead vocals for the “Telephone Numbers Theme,” a happy, chirpy pop tune that sounds like Juliana Hatfield fronting the Apples in Stereo. The Umbrellas’ last record was one of my favorites of last year, and while I wouldn’t go so far as to say Scarecrow II is that good, it appeals to the same part of my power pop-addled brain. Will I listen again?: Probably.
Jerskin Fendrix, Once Upon a Time…in Shropshire (untitled (recs)): Those last two records are pop records with a baseline appeal to, well, pretty much anybody. This Jerskin Fendrix album is markedly weirder, but that’s to be expected from the guy behind the Oscar-nominated score to Yorgos Lanthimos’ markedly weird 2023 movie Poor Things. That relationship continues: Fendrix also scored Lanthimos’ 2024 film Kinds of Kindness and his upcoming Bugonia, and Lanthimos directed the video to Once Upon a Time…in Shropshire’s lead track, “Beth’s Farm” (a video that starred Fendrix and Poor Things star Emma Stone).
“Beth’s Farm” is a compellingly weird way to start a record, built on a burbling melody formed out of a sampled, chopped up, and synthesized human voice. More often, Ferskin is in Nick Cave territory, an ominously deep-voiced goth piano balladeer. Sometimes, he twists it in weird ways, from the massive post-rock guitars that burst forth in “Sk1”to the big swell of violin and whistling in “Mum & Dad” that sounds very Andrew Bird. “Jerskin Fendrix Freestyle” gooses up the tempo in the middle of the album as Fendrix wails to be heard over horns having a free jazz freakout. But the back half of the album is all lengthy (average length: over seven-and-a-half minutes) spare piano ballads. To be honest, my patience was being tasked a bit by the time I got to penultimate track “Together Again,” which plays like Nick Cave and Bob Dylan having an argument as Fendrix’s voice ping-pongs between a deep purr and an amelodic yelp.
After two spins, all I can confidently say about Once Upon a Time…in Shropshire is that I don’t really know what to think of it. That’s mostly in a good way: even if some of the long songs tend to drag (more of a “me” problem—as this column goes on, I expect my general distaste of songs over six minutes long will come up a lot), the album on a whole is unpredictable and weird and throws genre out the window as Fendrix just follows his muse wherever it goes. A few lyrics jumped out at me as impeccably well-put, but Fendrix also constantly sings of “Jerskin” in the third person as if he’s a character in his own stories. Is this pretentious, inscrutable, or a window into the artist’s mind? It’s too soon for me to tell, but I’m intrigued enough to stick with it to find out. Will I listen again?: Yes. | Jason Green
