Pleasure Symbols Create Alluring Goth Pop on “Closer and Closer Apart”

One of the more tantalizing releases in the last few years was a brief four-song EP from an Australian band called Pleasure Symbols released in 2016. I knew nothing about the band except for what was on the record, which was this hazy, goth/shoegaze-influenced darkwave that was stylish and intriguing. Three years later, they’ve surfaced again with their first full-length, Closer and Closer Apart, after some lineup and sound changes. But despite the overhauls, that core of the band’s style is still there, and this will end up being one of the year’s best albums in this shoegaze and dream pop realm.

The sound on Closer and Closer Apart is more clear, with Jasmine Dunn’s vocals actually being decipherable instead of buried in the sound and mumbled like on that first EP. That change removes a bit of the alluring mystery they had initially, but it’s probably a worthwhile tradeoff in terms of appealing to a slightly wider audience and making more traditionally expressive music. They’ve also moved from the creepier darkwave style into a more familiar goth-dream-pop sound that is inspired by about half the bands that existed in the 1980s.

Despite the move into very well-worn territory, Pleasure Symbols maintain a clear sense of identity on this album by zeroing in on a very specific aesthetic and executing it on song after song with total confidence. The shimmering guitar, the rumbling bass and Dunn’s dreamy-yet-forceful lyrics are exactly what I like about this style of music, especially when it’s combined with this kind of strong pop songwriting. The best songs like “Image Reflected,” “Dissociation,” and “Heavy Breathing” combine major hooks with inward-looking lyrics that touch on the themes you’d expect from any self-respecting goth band: love, control, darkness, suffering, etc. None of the concepts here are new, but it’s been awhile since they’ve been done with this level of thought and craft.

Weyes Blood Tries to Find Meaning in Impending Disaster on “Titanic Rising”

Natalie Mering, aka Weyes Blood, loves the movies. I know this because her latest album, Titanic Rising, has a song called “Movies” on it where she sings “I love the movies.” I also know this because the album’s sound has that high-definition, cinematic quality with opulent string arrangements and lyrics that portray her as a character looking for meaning in life in these heightened, unreal times. At the end of the song, she declares she wants to be her own movie, capturing how the weirdness of our current existence has caused people to experience it almost out-of-body, as the hero in the story of their life that is playing concurrently with everyone else’s.

In 2019, the movie we’re all starring in is a disaster movie like (wait for it) Titanic, except the script isn’t nearly as tight as James Cameron’s masterpiece. Also, the characters in this movie all know the ship is going to sink but can’t actually do anything about it. So instead of being a massively dramatic, entertaining spectacle, it’s often just boring (like the pre-iceberg parts), and Mering gets that, too. “Something to Believe” portrays the relatable desire to get out of her own head and experience an escape from the reality none of us have any control over: “Give me something I can see; something bigger and louder than the voices in me.”

Titanic Rising feels like an attempt at crafting that escape herself, and it’s in a similar space as some other albums I’ve loved in the past couple years like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s The Kid, Björk’s Utopia and Julia Holter’s Aviary, which all responded to the current climate of senseless ugliness with thoughtful, sometimes excessive beauty. The sound on this album is gorgeous throughout with psychedelic synths and strings along with smooth production. It’s bolstered even more by Mering’s voice, which has a rich throwback quality that is reminiscent of Judy Garland and Patsy Cline, with a bit of Joni Mitchell and Aimee Mann tossed in. It’s easy on the ears, but the themes she is grappling with are complex and difficult.

Before I even listened to this album, I knew it was dealing with climate change and was worried it was going to be a bunch of on-the-nose songs about glaciers melting. Instead, outside of the occasional lyrical reference, it’s a subject that looms over the music, much like it does in our day-to-day lives where we go about our mundane business and then occasionally remember “oh yeah, we’re all gonna die.” Mering captures a lot of relatable anxieties and stresses in this album, showing she has that rare gift of making her own observations feel universal. And despite occasionally gloomy material, the sound of Titanic Rising on songs like the jaunty “Everything” and theatrical opener “A Lot’s Gonna Change” conveys a sense of warmth and optimism, even with disaster hanging overhead. I guess the one upside of the planet being destroyed is that it’s inspiring albums that sound like this.

“Fleabag” Might Be a Perfect TV Show

The only bad part of the second season of Fleabag, the comedy written by and starring Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is how inept it made me feel as a writer. I try my best not to compare myself to others and at this point I don’t even have grand artistic ambitions, especially in the realm of fiction. But when the screen went black on this season, which I devoured in a couple of days, I just sat on my couch and let it sink in for a few minutes, keenly aware of how impossible it would be for me to ever come close to producing something this good. Fleabag might be the best comedy I’ve ever seen.

What makes it so great? I guess it makes sense to start with Waller-Bridge herself, who is intimidatingly talented, not just as a writer of dialogue and characters, but as an actress with precise comedic timing who can make you laugh just with a quick look at the camera. Her titular character (real name unknown) breaks the fourth wall constantly, which is Fleabag‘s most distinctive narrative device, but it’s used differently than a show like The Office. Rather than purporting to be a documentary, this feels more like the character perceiving the audience as her friend that she can always confide in. Without giving away too much, her looks and quips at the camera end up tying into the season two plot in a piece of writing that is almost impossibly smart and perceptive.

The character of Fleabag is a great tragicomic creation; she uses jokes and sex as a way to mask her inner pain that comes from feeling responsible for the death of her best friend and the loss of her mother. She is essentially the black sheep of her family, who all mostly treat her like crap, particularly her insufferable godmother played by Oscar winner Olivia Colman. Her sister, Claire, is a fascinating character in her own right. She’s tightly wound, passive-aggressive and a workaholic, which is in direct contrast to Fleabag’s impulsive lifestyle that avoids responsibility. What the two characters share is that each has built up these different kinds of walls to avoid letting others see their true feelings, and their sisterhood is one of the more unique relationships on TV.

Fleabag faces a conflict with Claire’s husband this season, but her biggest turmoil comes when she becomes attracted to the young, cool priest who is working on her father’s wedding. This leads to an obvious clash of belief systems between the optimistic, religious priest and the atheist Fleabag, who has been through enough that the whole God thing is a tough sell. Again, without giving away too much, the relationship that forms here is fascinating and feels real despite its comedic origins, and the will-they-or-won’t-they tension had me about as nervous as I was at the end of Game of Thrones.

I’m always a fan of comedies that come with a healthy dose of sadness and bitterness, and this show might walk that line better than any other. It has all kinds of jokes: raunchy sex jokes, quiet observational jokes, character-based jokes — there’s even a pretty good fart joke. But its best moments are when the characters let their guards down and reveal their true feelings, and the show has moments that rival the pathos of any drama. Like the main character herself, the humor in Fleabag is what draws you in, but the impression it leaves is ultimately much more impactful than just a laugh.