Foxygen - Hang

The Guardian 80

(Jagjaguwar)

Psychologists suggest that continual encounters with novelty can make time go slower. Try it out on the third album from these stylistic magpies. It spans only half an hour – a fraction of the California duo’s last sprawling effort – but it’s near perpetual motion. Animated by a game 40-piece symphony orchestra, Hang filters the glam maximalism of the 70s – heavy on Bowie, Reed and Rundgren – through a digital attention span. A phenomenal range of styles are lovingly spliced together, from funk to folk, but sweet melodies and sheer musicality make this an invigorating blast rather than an exasperating drag. Only woolly lyrics stop the album achieving the sharp quality of its influences.

Pitchfork 70

“What are we good for if we can’t make it?” Sam France wondered on the last Foxygen album, …And Star Power. It was a pertinent question, since for a while there it didn’t seem like his band would make it. At the height of their dysfunction, Foxygen seemed to break up every week; they quickly became as known for their onstage meltdowns as their eccentric classic-rock pastiches. Music came so effortlessly to the group, but the mechanics of simply being a band seemed beyond them. When the duo launched what they called their Farewell Tour in 2015, it wasn’t so much a fake-out or an in-joke as an acknowledgement of the possible: For a band like this, any tour could be a farewell tour. So what would their legacy be if one of those breakups had stuck? As well received as their breakthrough record We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic was at the time, would anybody remember it a decade later if that had been the end? All the goodwill in the world doesn’t buy a band much if they no longer exist.

Fascinatingly overstuffed and unscripted, …And Star Power in hindsight feels like a placeholder, the work of a band trying to survive long enough to make another one. For their extravagant follow-up, though, Foxygen set out to demonstrate just how much they’re capable of when they’re playing the long game. Recorded with a 40-some-piece orchestra and dubiously billed as the group’s “first proper studio album,” Hang is the kind of investment of time, money, and patience a band can only make if they intend to stick around for a while, an audacious timpani crash of an album that satirizes its own grandiosity in real time. Though France still sings in a kind of spin-the-wheel Jagger/Bowie/Reed impression, he and Jonathan Rado have dropped their usual grab-bag approach in favor of a more disciplined homage to the theatrical rock records of the late ’70s, particularly the Broadway-adoring budget busters of Billy Joel, Elton John, and Meat Loaf. There’s a commitment to concept here rarely found outside of Destroyer albums.

Conducted by Trey Pollard with arrangement assists from indie-rock’s go-to maximalist Matthew E. White, the assembled big band isn’t just for show. It’s at the center of every track, from the sumptuous, Philly soul strings of the IMAX-sized opener “Follow The Leader” to the frolicsome brass of the Sunset Boulevard tribute “Avalon,” which culminates in a swinging hot jazz breakdown right out of The Muppet Show. The drummer takes an actual tap dance solo.

Hang hits peak artifice at its halfway point with “America,” a song as wide in scope as its title. Feeding off the faux-importance of its arrangement, France belts out a succession of clichés about dreams, patriotism, and heroism, and dusts off an old-fashioned critique of entertainment industry superficiality (“You only play yourself when you’re in Hollywood!”) Somehow the track isn’t even the album’s most elaborate parody of bygone songwriting conventions. That distinction goes to the mock magnum opus “Rise Up,” which opens with a command to “pull yourself up from the fires of hell” and “follow your own heart,” and concludes with the time-tested revelation that the thing “you’ve been searching all your life”—you probably know where this is going—“was with you all the time.”

The danger with any record this high concept is that it’ll be easier to admire than to enjoy, and Foxygen haven’t completely avoided that trap. Between its mammoth arrangements and France’s singing-in-the-shower gusto, Hang is sometimes just too much. Even though it’s barely a half hour long, it demands such constant attention that it can be hard to make it through the whole thing in a single sitting. And to the extent that the record is a joke, the sheer scale of the project makes Foxygen over-commit to it. By the album’s final stretch, when France sings about flamingos in two consecutive songs, the band seems to be itching for a change of pace, one of those sudden stylistic leaps that used to come one after another on their previous records.

Not coincidentally, then, the album’s most refreshing song is the one that most breaks form. With “On Lankershim,” the band takes a breezy detour into the well-groomed A.M. country of the ’70s—for three easygoing, slightly out of place minutes they become the Eagles, at least until France adopts Jonathan Richman’s Hippie Johnny-despising drawl to sing about an actress friend of his (“You know, she says she can get me paaaaaaaarts.”) With Hang, Foxygen have proven their capacity for lavish spectacle, but they’re still at their best when they give themselves the freedom to roam.

The Guardian 60

(Jagjaguwar)

Foxygen’s new album is barely over half an hour long, but it still manages to be all kinds of ridiculous within that timeframe. The Californian duo’s psych tendencies have blossomed here into wild glam Bowie pastiches, camp vaudeville turns and big band brass freakouts (apparently, all eight songs feature a 40-plus-piece orchestra).

At first the wackiness is too much to digest, a sort of “you don’t have to be mad to review this, but it helps!” Yet against the odds, Hang does reward patience – there’s a Todd Rundgren-esque devotion to melody throughout and, on the country-tinged On Lankershim, something approaching a conventional tune (until the funny voices arrive). It won’t be for everyone; I still can’t decide if it’s even for me. And as for the band? Even they admit they ended up delving into “lyrical scenarios we don’t quite understand” – which just about sums it up.

Drowned In Sound 20

Mind, Foxygen haven’t had an original thought between their two noggins in four years. Romance and sunshine occupy every cranny of their headspace - they can barely eat or defecate, for such petty chores distract them from the fine art of daydreaming. Candy floss and Skittles replaced the Velvet Underground’s whips and heroin in We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic, while Todd Rundgren’s cribbed studio spells bloated …And Star Power into a sprawling mess of dust and glitter. To listen to Foxygen, one must suspend any expectation of reality, or truth, or any artistic intention whatsoever. To quote the youth, these guys just want 'all the feels'.

From that angle, Hang is really no different from the duo’s previous delusions – except that now, they realise what shit they’ve shat, and have gone to outrageous lengths to cover the stench. Some overindulging adults (i.e. Matthew E White and Trey Pollard) granted them a big ol’ orchestra (plus those eyesore throwbacks, the Lemon Twigs) to cavort and gambol over their high school musical, and Sam France has somehow developed the power to croon straight to the moon. This yields a theatrical set, the likes of which Elton John and Billy Joel have surely employed in their own dramas: billowy euphoniums, flowery flutes, sizzling violins, and so forth. Granted, those two could actually write plots – France, on the other hand, seems content to just repeat the word 'trauma' or whine endlessly about that actress girl that never seems to come his way.

When 'Avalon' digresses at least three times into Broadway-slick whimsy, the listener suspects that perhaps Foxygen are trying to be funny. By the time an overactive tuba accompanies France on the line ”while flamingos dance on spaceships with black fire in their mouths (via “Upon A Hill”), the listener has drowned in a sea of irrelevance. It’s sad, really – sometimes you wonder if France is actually trying to convey some sort of a story, like when 'America' shifts between patriotic anthem to ballad to swing jazz to god knows what else (for the Joel fans out there – it’s like a direct-to-DVD version of 'Scenes from an Italian Restaurant'). I mean, it’s possible – but when the only lines you’ve got to work with are snatches like how could I have learned to have used you? and just a witch that comforts you when you’re dyin’, what plot can you possibly conceive? It’d be like stringing together random GIFs to make an argument. Even the word 'America' seems out of context in the song - its very presence conveys a string of signifiers that Foxygen are too lazy to unpack.

That’s the crux of Hang - the orchestra tries so desperately to stage this cool retro show, but there are so many glaring holes in the script. 'Mrs. Adams' could’ve been some sweet lost Elvis Costello single, but why the hell should we care about Mrs. Adams? What kind of trauma is France railing on about in 'Trauma', and who is he to assume that everyone can relate to his melodramatic love sickness? The only tune with any conviction behind it is the suave, Boz Scaggs-ish opener 'Follow the Leader', and that still doesn’t save Foxygen from their own mire of foolishness. God forbid that anyone trudge to the pseudo-inspirational unicorn stool of 'Rise Up', a pig’s trough of truisms delivered from on high. It’d be more poignant if it followed some period of darkness, or genuine turmoil – but after the empty, sugar-spun carnival of Hang, every one of France’s declarations (“wake up early, start taking care of your health… follow your heart, if nothing else”) ring hollow.

Let’s end it this way: you know when you’re trying to ask for actual advice from your friends on Facebook, but the only people that answer are smug dickheads with their genius one-liners? That’s Foxygen, in a nutshell. I’m not the praying type, but I do pray they at least read a fucking newspaper. Anything to pull their heads out of their asses and teach them real despair.