Sweet Trip – You Will Never Know Why

If you think waiting two years between albums by one of your favorite bands or musicians is a long time, try waiting for six. In mid-2003, Sweet Trip released Velocity : Design : Comfort, a sprawling and sensuous album filled with breathy, angelic vocals; bubbling, skittering electronics; Technicolor synths; klangy guitar frameworks; blurry effects; and blankets of fuzzy, shoegaze-y noise. It still stands as one of the best maximalist synthesis of dream pop, bedroom electronic, and spacey rock, the varied styles which stand alone but are commonly united under the broader “bliss out” umbrella. Following it must not have been an easy task, but their new album You Will Never Know Why represents both a follow-up that maintains the peerless quality of their previous work and a confident step out as artists.

Band leader/song sculptor (there is a drawing of a razor blade on the cover after all) Roby Burgos and singer Valerie Reyes Cooper are back, along with past contributor Aaron Porter on bass, and a real live drummer in newcomer Rob Uytingco. Paralleling the solidification of personnel, the album is more solidly constructed out of traditional rock elements and instrumentation, every track blueprinted for maximum effect. That’s not to say the electronic elements have been jettisoned. Instead, they work more as brilliant interior decorating to the songs’ sturdy foundations. And even as the album takes a more rockist approach, the attention to detail and texture is impeccable (check the unique treatment on the squiggles in the first couple minutes of the indelible pop-rock of “Darkness”). There are enough hooks and details here to keep a listener interested over continuous and intensive listening. Another big surprise is how much Burgos sings. The harmonies and juxtapositions between his voice and Cooper’s, which are both gauzy and sweet, provide balance, grounding, and depth.

Beyond considerations of sound, this album’s artistic stepping out is found in the confidence of its songwriting, its more direct lyrics, its more transparent structures, and the consistency in its thematic push. There is a hermetically sealed quality to this music, unpolluted by outside imperfections. Each song is a sound world unto itself, a self-contained and internally logical entity, like a snow globe of flip-book. While before, Sweet Trip songs were more differentiated based on how they came out of the speakers or in differences in their instrumentation, they now show a command for creating mood with textural and compositional means which go beyond the simple dichotomies of hard/soft, quiet/loud, analog/digital, and so on. In this way, this work is much more expressive than their previous.

The subject matter is more bittersweet than sweet, and the whole album sounds like an open letter making sense of past relationships ended badly, and ruminations on how that leaves the individual. The first half of the album has a damp, sad feel, leading with two more pensive tracks before bringing out the huge “The Final Countdown”/M83 synths on “Forever”, which alternates between the intimacy of individual personality and the all-consuming monolithic experience of hurt feelings. “Acting” is the album’s epic, whose bossa rhythm section, strange electronic accompaniment, and cobbled together breaks, drives them straight into Stereolab territory with rousing results, coming to terms that “you know this time it’s over”.  The escapist ballad “Milk” starts out with just acoustic guitar and voice, and you’ll barely notice as the layers are slowly added, until Cooper’s refrain “You will drift away” commands your attention and you realize you’re in the midst of a sea of daydreamy orchestration. Mid-tempo track “No Words to be Found” shuffles along with a masterstroke guitar melody which sounds graceful but conflicted, sadly resigned but knowing, exotic but personal. “Pretending” shows a more upbeat side, perking up with brassy synths and talky keyboards, and with the swooned words “pretty soon you’re dead” it represents the point in working through interpersonal turmoil when one gains the perspective to look at the obsessed-over situation as a small and petty concern not worth all the trouble. They save their best pop moment for the electronic jangle pop of the penultimate track, “Your World is Eternally Complete”, with lyrics which are self-motivating and uplifting, thematically completing the arc of the dialogue which began as melancholy disbelief and progressed through denial, dissociation, withdrawal, perspective-gaining, acceptance, and finishes with the character moving on with life as a wiser and more jaded entity.

This is another album among the best in its field, and hopefully won’t be overlooked like Sweet Trip’s prior work. Cutting back on some of their indulgences, blowing away a little bit of the atmosphere, and bringing in a consistent compositional focus have allowed Sweet Trip to find new sweet spots, and have given them the space to create an album which flows dramatically even as it surprises.  I’ll never know why it took so long to follow up Velocity : Design : Comfort, but thanks to the great command of sound, structure, and feel on display on You Will Never Know Why, I will never care.

Sweet Trip

Darla Records