Allo Darlin’
Bright Nights
(Slumberland Records)
2/5
On a warm, windy afternoon in 2012 I lay on unattended grass listening to acoustic Jens Lekman and Cat Power, determining my 10-year plan. It was this young woman who believed sporting a carefully teased bob as a career-barista would be most fulfilling. By now, then, I’d be riding my cruiser bike to work and improv class in a belted dress and a compulsion for an overtly idiosyncratic laugh. Then I developed a stronger sense of self, and grew into my ears—though I still allow Lekman and Power to rule a segment of my world.
Allo Darlin’ has yet to do this: mature, fill out. Their returning album of over a decade interval, Bright Nights, stales in early-2010s naivety. Indeed, it is my belief that they’ve fallen into the indie-pop trap of mistaken timelessness. The simple tune does not carry to this moment; it mischaracterizes the ethos.
Perhaps it’s their hiatus that has caused such arrested development, but then it’s important to remember the sea of other forgettable copycat indie pop albums that are still perpetually rolled out. It’s an epidemic that they are among; a variety of musicians that add no more nor any less to the genre. They are all so-so at their very best and blasphemous at their very worst.
Of course I leave myself vulnerable here when I claim an entire genre to be lacking in anything radical. To be clear, what I desire, and what has not been delivered here with Bright Nights, is anything really sincere to itself.
I believe Allo Darlin’ and its vocalist Elizabeth Morris Innsef when she says this newest album is one “from the heart, dealing with themes of love, birth, and death.” My question, though, still asks “whose heart?”
Allo Darlin’ lives up to their name: the quartet is loveable in the kind of way that hurts. The type of sweetness you envy. And if we were to sojourn back in 2012, the pastel hues colouring the sky and cardigans, it would be the sweetness one treasures. At last, today, all I am left with is an uninspired echo.