Dancing in a Minefield – Plushgun
There’s a grand tradition of sleek electro-pop with a slightly overwrought sense of the emotional that was re-popularized by The Postal Service in the early part of the decade, but really has its roots back in the 80s.
Plushgun is yet another fine entry into that tradition. When everything works on their debut Pins and Panzers, you get delightful, airy, energetic pop hooks and a sense of good feeling about the world at large.
By far the best example is the opening track “Dancing in a Minefield” which glistens and shines like the very best of the genre. It’s tough work to write a song about empowerment through dancing without veering into the utterly preposterous or the monumentally fey, but they pull it off.
It’s the sort of song that you can’t experience part way. If you try and hold onto your ironic distance, it’ll come off all wrong. Because it asks you to forget your cynicism and well-learned life lessons and return to the place where you truly believed in endless possibility – when it seemed like the only thing you could do was simply stand up and shout ‘no’ at a world filled with people trying to impose their standards, their morality on you.
It’s a reminder for all of us who learned over time that you have to be realistic and pick among bad options that buried within us remains that nobler, stupider, less wise but more vivacious self. And that there may still come times when we have to be willing to take stands even though we can’t win, that empty symbolism is only empty because we let ourselves get defined by the world outside.
Elsewhere, “Let Me Kiss You Now (And I’ll Fade Away)” is a rollicking good time, filled with handclaps and big goofy choruses and “ba da da da, da da da da”s. And then there’s “Just Impolite” which is proably the closest they get to a Postal Service track. It’s big and bold and cute all at the same time – the sort of song that sounds just a tad too precious on the first go-round but you end up going back because it’s just so insistently catchy. And by the fourth or fifth time, you just give in and enjoy the moment for its own sake.
So those are the major successes. But what happens when things don’t work out as well? Answer: pretty much the same, except moreso. The weaker songs still have that same sound (if a bit plinkier and less engaging), but really get into trouble with the lyrics. What sounded heartfelt and gloriously excitable on the better songs loses its luster and you’re left realizing that you’re listening to an adult getting all googly-eyed about high school.
To some extent, I’m okay with that. Music doesn’t have to be about who makes it – it’s also about who engages with it. And this is the sort of stuff that’s designed to be heard by an earlier generation. Even more, there’s a fine line between projection – a kind of simpering desire to simply re-engage in the sort of hysterical world-making that we all do when we’re 16 but quickly grow out of – and a far less self-conscious kind of nostalgia. In the latter, you aren’t trying to simply go back, you are trying to keep that part of you alive at least in memory.
You can honor and respect the vivacity of youth without lionizing it. See, for example, the classic John Huges films. At times, that’s precisely the spot that Plushgun finds. In those moments, they are vibrant, cognizant of a sort of deep absurdity in youth but joyful nonetheless.
If they could find that balance on every track, this would be a truly great album. Unfortunately, they don’t, and we’re left instead with an extremely enjoyable, occasionally poignant, and often exhilirating record that is also flawed in some deep ways.
“A Crush to Pass the Time” is, I think, the perfect representation of both of these forces. It’s the median point between schlocky-hyper-sentimentalization and luminous-nostalgia. It’s potentially the most deliberately “80s sounding” of the tracks (even tossing in a Talking Heads name-check), and to fine effect. And yet…you can’t help but imagine the lyrics as the poetry written in a journal by some nerdy guy in high school about a crush he was too nervous to act on.
Pins and Panzers is a good album, and they clearly have the potential in them to make a great album. In order to do so, they probably need to find a way to make music that’s more mature, that deviates from the one-note attitude of commerating youth – but to do so without giving up on their intensity and exuberance.