Released: 10.07.2020.
Genre: Synthwave
Basing your expectations towards a new album on your past experiences with the artist is natural, but it can catch you off guard on your first listen when you get something else. It’s especially true when you’re really excited for a release, when you already imagine what it would sound like, and when you even plan a special occasion around it. For me, the circumstances around The Midnight’s new album happened to line up too perfectly to be true: based on the band’s previous output, listening to the record right at midnight, on a lakeside summer holiday, getting drunk and stoned with also Midnight-loving friends, it was hard to imagine a better setting for the duo’s nostalgic, summery, crystalline synthpop.
Except it quickly turned out, that for this occasion, Monsters isn’t the perfect soundtrack we expected. That achievement still belongs to their first full-length LP, Endless Summer – as its title suggests, that’s the one filled with feel-good anthems for long, warm nights, most tracks having big enough choruses and saxophone hooks to create a noticeable vibe even when it’s playing rather quietly in the background. Monsters, on the other hand, doesn’t work that way: it’s too experimental, too downtempo, too subtle for that. It requires a closer listening to reveal its attributes.
What I’m trying to say is, it’s understandable that on initial listening, Monsters doesn’t seem to deliver what one would like to receive from it. After all, The Midnight’s reputation is that they’re one of – if not the – frontrunners of the vocal synthwave scene, which is characterized by taking an almost unhealthy amount of 80s nostalgia and analogue synths, then refreshing it with modern pop influences and production. For the better part of the last decade, it emerged as a great and exciting underground scene, but sooner or later, every scene gets stale if it doesn’t evolve. I’m not saying that already happened (shoutout to Jessie Frye, who released the excellent, and very typical vocal synthwave album Kiss Me In The Rain on the same day as Monsters), but it’s about time some of the leading artists try to take the genre somewhere else.
Also, the main essence of the Midnight’s music was never really specifically “80s-style retro jams”, but their perfect encapsulation of the term “mono no aware”. They say this themselves in their biography, and I don’t think I can define the term better then it’s written there:
“It means basically, the sad beauty of seeing time pass—the aching awareness of impermanence. These are the days that we will return to one day in the future only in memories.”
While Monsters doesn’t always use the same, established 80s-style framework to evoke this feeling in the listener, for the most part, it manages to achieve this with techniques they haven’t explored yet. Take Seventeen for example, which incorporates some, initially strange, trap-style beats – I mean in 2020, isn’t that almost a requirement? – but it’s lyrics focusing on young, naive love and its passing (“Time takes no prisoners, you’ll see”), melancholic melodies, Tyler Lyle’s emotional vocals and soaring guitar solo retain that classic Midnight-feel.
The same is true for the majority of the record, except there are fewer trap beats and more vocoders, panflutes and 90s new age influences. While these aren’t as evident as the saxophone and the analogue synths for achieving the same vibe, they make sense if you think about that, in their own corny way, they also evoke some kind of nostalgic and impermanent feeling – think Return to Innocence for example. I get that tracks like America Online, Dream Away, or the slightly too uneventful interludes like The Search for Ecco and Helvetica might be too out of the box for some who aren’t friends with that genre, but Tim McEwan’s expert production makes them work. Another highlight is the title track, a duet with Jupiter Winter, where the mellow breakdown in the place of the chorus makes it the most contemporary sounding track they’ve ever done, while the lyrics yet again focus on a painful past romance.
The experimental approach doesn’t mean there aren’t some classic Midnight tracks on here. The signature saxophone makes two appearances, first on the groovy, somewhat also 90s sounding Dance With Somebody, perhaps the closest to a real feel-good jam on the record and a rightful single, and the uptempo Deep Blue, where the only euphoric moment came the first time I heard it as a single: it did mark the return of that sweet cheesy sax after an album completely without it, but the hook just isn’t good enough, and the whole thing sounds like an outtake from Days of Thunder or Endless Summer. Prom Night, on the flip side, is another highlight: almost overflowing with saccharine, it perfectly grabs that teenage feeling, where the excitement and importance of asking someone for a slow dance feels comparable to a marriage proposal, and should absolutely end up in the climactic ball scene of a Netflix teen movie/series soon. But the best song is the laidback Brooklyn: while rather minimalistic in sound and structure, it’s beautiful melodies and lyrics (especially: “And when the rent’s too high/We’ll just buy cheaper wine”) capture everything The Midnight is loved for: nostalgia for simpler times, peaceful and happy moments ingrained in our memory, hopefulness, reminiscence on your life at 4AM, and once again, the sad beauty of impermanence.
Monsters is a great example of organic evolution in an artist’s music: while the sound often pushes the boundaries of synthwave or even breaks them entirely, at its core it keeps the substance what made it great. Of course, if The Midnight continues to go on this route, the question is whether the experimental and very downtempo nature of it will sacrifice the euphoric atmosphere of their concerts – or it will work differently in a live setting without the need for anthems at all. But for now I’m confident in the duo: as long as “mono no aware” is present in what they do, they’ll always be on the right track.
Verdict: 9/10
AllThingsSixString 