Where do I even begin with this one... how about my expectations? They were high. I loved Pas/Cal's debut EP, The Handbag Memoirs, and have waited ever since for the band to get its shit together for a proper full-length debut. My expectations only went up when I heard "You Were Too Old for Me" a couple months in advance of the album. It was sprawling, epic pop, like two or three Kinksy songs jammed together into one monstrous stream-of-conscious monologue. I imagined the track to be a kind of tentpole among other more streamlined exercises in twee (more akin to their earlier material). "You Were Too Old for Me" is a risky song, and I appreciated that Pas/Cal was a band that could pull off those kinds of risks.
Well, expectations and imaginings aren't reality, so all that goes out the window when trying to assess what I Was Raised actually is. "You Were Too Old for Me" turns out to be less of standapart track than I'd anticipated, in that nearly every song on the album follows the same pattern: half the tracks here are longer than five minutes (and the three tracks making up the "Cherry Suite" total 8+), and all of the songs (regardless of length) employ Casimer Pascal's linear flow of lyrics. Add to that shifting tempos and song structures, few bona fide choruses or refrains, and the constant racket of bandmembers that don't know when to not play, when not to sing backup, and I Was Raised just comes out like one big hot mess. There are so many hooks in each song that I never do find one to hang my hat on. And that's really the album's biggest sin—how can it sound like pure pop yet shake off all the pleasure like water from a dog's back?
To attempt fairness to the band—they are, after all, good musicians and Pascal himself an entertaining singer and lyricist—this had to be their intention. Whereas their earlier EPs garnered comparisons to Belle & Sebastian and other sweater-wearing twee pop acts, I Was Raised seems to be anti-twee. It takes all the ingredients of the genre—coy lyrics, lots la la las, sugary harmonies—and cooks them into something a lot more difficult to consume. In some of these songs, you can hear the moment when someone in the band must have said Okay, let's stop here, and Pascal responded No, let's go further. It's a noble ambition.
Maximalist pop can work; Of Montreal, Fiery Furnaces, and (fifteen years ago) Heavy Vegetable all more or less succeed at it, each in different ways. But none of those bands abandon repetition altogether, nor a central melody that serves as the anchor to a song that might still sprawl in other directions. Neither do they forego simplicity, at least in spots, to give the listener a chance to pause and get their bearings. A lot of the songs on I Was Raised work really well all by themselves, but the record as a whole inures you to its charms.
- Pas/Cal: You Were Too Old for Me
- Pas/Cal: We Made Our Way, We Amtrakked
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