Here’s a big surprise: Haim got messed up this time. Here’s an even bigger surprise: clutter suits them.
Since sisters Danielle, Este, and Alana Haim emerged from the San Fernando Valley earlier in the last decade, they have been offering brilliant, professional records that flaunted their loyalty to traditionally unfair influences. His music immaculately hybridized producing music in supermarket aisles of all decades: California soft rockers like Fleetwood Mac and The Eagles, creators of adult contemporary hits loved by VH1 like Wilson Phillips and Paula Cole, pop-R & superstars. B as Destiny’s Child and TLC. Even when they were properly shaken (as in the “My Song 5” silencer of the “21st Century Schizoid Man”, or retreated into stillness (as in the rare and powerful “Right Now”), they were in perfect Hi- condition. Fi, with the best balance The only blurring on tracks like “Forever” and “Something To Tell You” was the line they walked between choreographed pop and easy-listening classic rock, an ideal fit for a time when bands rock stars aware of trends were trying to become pop stars.
Haim made two good albums in this mold. The first, 2013 The days are gone, was widely acclaimed for its crisp composition and unique aesthetics. The days are goneHaim’s deep singles pit and Haim’s relentless touring behind him, including countless festival concerts and an opening spot on the Taylor Swift Stadium tour, made them stars. But by the time they released Something to tell you Four years later, the long wait for new music, all while Haim remained extremely present in the public eye, had allowed both expectations and reaction to build up. In terms of quality and substance, the albums were almost the same, but in the absence of the buzz that once animated them, about the same did not inspire the same enthusiastic response. In fact, consistency led some listeners to dismiss Haim as one of those doomed groups to endlessly repeat their fully-formed debut with diminishing returns.
No one can accuse them of making the same album again now. Women in Music pt. III, this Friday, is clearly the music of the same three women. However, it shows a different side of Haim: looser, more informal, less perfectionist. It has great Wowee Zowee energy, opening on a negative note and following a discursive and unpredictable trajectory from there. His long list of themes and his recurring focus on the nuances of domestic life link him to Father of the brideVampire Weekend album Danielle and her romantic partner Ariel Rechtshaid had a lot to consider last year. It is part of a recent lineage of deconstructed impressionist pop albums, enslaved by Frank Ocean’s. Blonde. And yet none of those comparisons comes close to encapsulating the spirit of WIMPIII. This is an album that could only have been made by Haim, one that becomes even closer and more personal than the portrait in the Something to tell you cover. Both lyrically and sonically, it is cruder than they have ever been allowed to record.
Given the title and photo of Haim surrounded by sausages serving as is Album art, it won’t come as a surprise that part of that revelation addresses Haim’s experiences as women in the male-dominated music industry. “Man From The Magazine”, in particular, rebukes the degrading treatment of journalists (“Do you make the same faces in bed?”) And the employees of the guitar store (“Hey girl, why don’t you play a few bars? “), culminating in one of WIMPIIIThe most memorable lines: “You don’t know how it feels, you expect me to take care of it / Until I’m perfectly numb / But you don’t know how it feels to be the pussy.” On the hit guitar “The Steps”, an exasperated Danielle informs her lover: “Every day I get up and earn money for myself / And even though we share a bed, you know I don’t need your help.”
But misogyny is just one of many causes fueling Haim’s exhaustion. Some of WIMPIIIThe songs frankly deal with depression, grief, and longing for a home. Many of them deal with the complexities and frustrations of long-term romance, about fighting with and for each other for reasons they cannot fully express. “I can’t understand why you don’t understand me, baby!” Danielle screams in “The Steps”. “It’s screwed, but it’s true / That I love you like I do”, she concludes about the powerful and basic “FUBT”. In the finger-pressed ballad “Leaning on You”, the sisters harmonize, “It takes everything I have to not screw this up.” The magnificent “Gasoline” combines a blues guitar and drums stammering with confessions of thanks for putting up with me like “I get sad and can’t look beyond what I’m sad”.
Haim combines this increased vulnerability with production by Danielle, Rechtshaid, and long-time collaborator Rostam Batmanglij, who scrapes away fragments of the band’s gleaming veneer, creating the illusion of disorder within the usual crisp textures and clever arrangements. Volume merchant Dave Fridmann mixes some songs, and many others mimic his charred, visceral signature sound. Buzzing noise and a ballistic guitar from Cass McCombs add a jarring twist to the ‘Up From A Dream’ chooglin. The deep cut “All That Ever Mattered” overlays his synthetic pop chorus with bloodcurdling screams and shreds of metal and hair by Amir Yaghmai of the Voidz. A muffled buzz gives “Man From The Magazine” the feel of a Joni Mitchell demo, while Rostam’s tape whistle mimics the fog of depression in “I Know Alone.” The sum total is low-fidelity by Haim’s standards, but far from a confusing early 90’s Guided By Voices cassette. The atmosphere is much closer to an old mixtape from the same time period full of old pop and rock songs recorded on the radio.
WIMPIIIThe use of vocal fuzz and other strategically neglected sounds does plug it in to the disciples of GBV The Strokes, another group of retro-minded pop-rockers ridiculed by cynics for their well-connected parents. (Never forget that Danielle toured as a guitarist for Julian Casablancas before Haim blew up.) Speaking of generational icons with well-connected parents, the album has a lot in common with Clairo’s production on Rostam Immunity, a melancholic office that blurred the borders between pop and indie rock in a way that, in a gesture of a circle, could not have existed without Haim. This is a record with room for Vegyn to playfully amuse himself like a British André 3000 in a shifting R&B song called “3AM”, to stab synthesizer Brass worthy of “You Can Call Me Al” in “Don’t Wanna”, for Jim -E Battery-powered programming that raises “FUBT” from gloomy calm to Top Gun the soundtrack is wild blue over there. Eclecticism, expansion, widespread sadness, frequent ’80s callbacks, the proud claim of the old disunity – all of this marks Haim as kindred spirits with 1975, though those who can bare their souls without being so extra As the. Matty Healy
The road to this new iteration of Haim began last summer with the sisters quietly approaching the studio, writing and releasing singles as they went along. Danielle communicated warmth towards Rechtshaid during his battle with cancer at Lou Reed’s tribute with the sax “Summer Girl”. She revealed the scope of her fight against depression in the song “Now I’m In It”, inspired by Savage Garden. In the reverent and sentimental “Hallelujah”, Este dealt with his daily struggle with diabetes while Alana cried for a friend who died too young. It was a corner-changing sequence for the group, one that separated them from their established roster and spurred their most rewarding creative output thus far. Those songs are added to the end of the album as additional tracks, a kind of prologue as an epilogue for the WIMPIII was.
The themes of love, loss and reconciliation are not new to Haim. “The Wire” and “I Want You Back”, the best songs from each of their first two albums, are apologies for letting go of a relationship that the singer should have stuck to. Theoretically, this is great emotional content, but at that point Haim came out as storytellers, industry professionals making made-up stories. The main sensation that these songs transmitted was the euphoria that accompanies an impeccable pop song. The world needs that kind of emotion, but Women in Music pt. III dig into something deeper and more real. Even when they happen with a certain lightness (“New York is cold / I tried winter there once / No!”) These songs are based on a fundamental tiredness (“Clearly, the biggest city in the world / But it was not my home / I felt more alone “). They exist under the cloud of anxiety and sadness that permeated daily life long before this year’s series of crises, one that sometimes dissipates in the embrace of a loved one.
In Women in Music pt. IIIAs in life, that tension is never completely resolved. “Some things never change,” the Haim sisters sing. “They never fade away / never end.” It’s more of an ebb and flow, a lifelong process of learning to find stability in the storm, largely learning to offer and accept support: “I’ve been depressed / Can you help me?” Lowering his guard enough to honestly represent that process, Haim came out with his defining work thus far, a collection of songs that redefines his legacy and opens up exciting new possibilities for his future. Through elegant filters but without a self-protective shine, it reflects both the disorder of this life and the tenderness that can carry us through it.
Women in Music pt. III leaves 6/26 in Columbia.
