One of my favorite ways to describe an album is as a “Sunday morning record”: warm, introspective and retrospective, splitting the difference between lush and sparse, and often times deeper than their eased atmosphere suggests. I thought about this depth in particular while listening to Destroyer’s Kaputt this past Sunday, a 2011 album that draws on jazz and pop of the mid 1980s to capture Dan Bejar’s disillusioned perspective on the disintegrating American dream: released near the middle of Obama’s presidential run, its an album that has (for better or worse) aged incredibly gracefully, a timeless and timely shattering of the American idol and ideal that feels more important than ever, and just as beautifully easy to enjoy thanks to its cinematic arrangements and wry lyricism. Kaputt’s most astute genre description, in my opinion, is its status as a contemporary work of sophistipop, a genre that melds jazz, soul, pop, and electronic music to tell mature, meditative, and personal narratives that ultimately meld the political into their lavishness as well.
At the end of last week, another contemporary work of sophistipop was released: Youth Lagoon’s latest, Rarely Do I Dream. Inspired by Trever Powers’ archiving of old family home videos, Powers explores the way memory distorts and reconfigures through ephemera like recordings and photographs, and through the excellent horn arrangements, soft rock guitar riffs, and closely tracked harmonies, Powers attempts to reconcile that memory with reality.
For this week’s The New Sincerest, I decided to use both of these albums as a jumping off point to broadly explore sophistipop’s capabilities, some of its many reinterpretations, and its ability to house deep lyrical and thematic depth in music that goes down as easily as a Sunday morning coffee.
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