Music Review: Voices

Phantogram
4/5 stars

The broadening spectrum of guy-girl electronic duos has infiltrated every trip hop-friendly sound studio from Los Angeles to New York. It’s no doubt that the pseudo-category is growing, but where do we place Phantogram? Fans appreciate Josh Carter and Sarah Barthel’s hesitance to play nice with genre: not enough vocals to match Sleigh Bells or power noise to sit with Crystal Castles. They might be hard to classify, but Phantogram's latest album is more concerned with blurring genres than aligning to them.

The dark intro to 'Black Out Days' is a worthy example of this. It’s an electronic dream pop anthem that would make even Grimes drool, with preluding echoes that burst into a chorus long before the first verse. A sample of Barthel’s jittery vocals overlaps another featuring her melodic refrains. The song highlights not only her vocal range, but also the group’s commitment to incorporating more vocals into this album. Instead of going the classic route of mixing an industrial electronic sample, they spliced their own vocals for a warmer sounding choral beat. The result is a happy reminder that not all electronic music has to sound like it’s on the “Transformers” soundtrack.

Carter’s most prominent vocals on the album come in the form of ‘I Don’t Blame You,’ a somber contemplation on severed romantic ties. Like most of the album’s lyrics, those in this song read like abstractions of personal feelings (“And when you talk, I'm barely listening...I'm on the wrong side of town and I'm wrapped up in gauze”). It gratifies listeners with a glimpse of the sensitive subject matter without beating us to death with it. The song lies somewhere between diary entry and difficult we-need-to-talk dialogues. Paired with a pulsating synthesizer, though, its stimulating drum and cymbal combination saves it from falling into sappy ballad territory.

It’s about time someone wrote a song tribute to Bill Murray; the actor’s namesake track isn’t explicitly about him (Carter told The Atlantic they had always pictured Murray as part of the song’s visuals and want him to be in the music video), but it does a good job of evoking his jovial warmth, even if just as a partial result of title placebo. Bendy guitar and faint vocal echoes cleanly mesh with a gradually developing synthesizer and Barthel’s slow-paced refrains. The song’s lyrics are sparse in terms of sheer word count, but their scarcity is only enhanced by their self-reflective potency. In less than 100 words, Barthel gives us substantive takes on feeling loved and emotional dependency.

“Voices” isn’t a drastic takeoff from 2009’s “Eyelid Movies.” Thankfully, the group didn’t fall for the dogma of drastic stylistic departures auto-translating into better music. Phantogram opted to subtly tweak to what they know best. The albumgives us a familiar serving of distorted drums and electronic sampling, but the vocals refuse to serve as mere backup for the lot of synth beats. There’s surely a handful of analogues to the New York (Greenwich, and not the Village) duo’s once-niche subgrouping, but their sound has yet to get lost in the wave of turntables and MacBooks.