Despite their polish, GB’s songs never feel self-indulgent, instead leveraging road-worn technique in service of delicate arrangements that are cool and distant. “The Next Day,” perhaps as close to a straightforward indie-rock song here, achieves a particular lightness that emerges from just how proficiently the band plays together (a feeling I associate with the chemistry displayed on R.E.M.’s first few records). “Belly,” a modal standout that rises from a whisper to lock into a lurching groove, is altogether stranger: a pastiche of careful references expressed not in Berntsen’s lyrics, but rather through odd chord changes, distinctive guitar tones, and light percussive touches that overwhelm with implied signification. Yet for all the inspirations that come to mind—Dire Straits, Gastr del Sol, both Mark Kozlek and Jim O’Rourke’s respective fascinations with 1970s AOR as solo artists—the song is subtle and even purposefully arcane its references legible only to those schooled in the traditions they draw on, and even then requiring a careful ear. Berntsen and his bandmates leverage every aspect of their record collections to construct these intricate collages, sounding at once like so many things—Japanese psych-rock, private-press folk recordings, somber Midwestern slowcore—yet wholly like themselves, and specific to a contemporary moment in which the past weighs heavy on the present.
Herzsprung’s lyrics are similarly cryptic. Berntsen says that he sourced much of his material from the pages of Metro, a free London newspaper, which he cut up and rearranged into deadpan lines cushioned by ironic distance. “Adrenaline” breaks the fourth wall with a reference to The Simpsons, and is filled with lines that sound like they were borrowed from social-media captions (“In my feelings,” “I am vibing”). Other tracks find an uncanny intimacy in the cut-up method, yielding surprisingly expressive results. On “Shit River,” a loose, elliptical verse whose guitar tone recalls ML Buch gives way to a sprawling chorus in which Berntsen strains at the limits of his otherwise temperate vocals; backed by a full choir and heavy, blown-out guitars, the song climaxes in an impenetrable wall of sound—a moment of bare-it-all freedom and one of the album’s many highs, ringing out for an eternity of blissful distortion before giving way to pensive reflection on “Katie Magic True.”
For all of their differences, Berntsen and RMC peers like Buch and Sonne share a conceptual orientation in which distinct sounds from the past—Buch’s chorus-drenched guitar tone and its debt to Don Henley, for example—are made strange through expansive reinterpretations that contain only the faintest traces of their source material. In his 2011 book about nostalgia culture and the difficulty of imagining a future for rock music outside of it, Simon Reynolds once called Sonic Youth the “ultimate portal band” for the abundance of references—not just musical, but also to visual art, film, literature, and politics—that they brought to their music. Berntsen and his RMC peers achieve something similar in their work, excavating bygone sounds to produce songs that are rich with signification, yet subtle and at times even willfully opaque, never merely nostalgic.
