Oso Oso - The Yunahon Mixtape

Pitchfork 78

Jade Lilitri’s latest project has “mixtape” in the title, but it is pretty much the opposite of super-mutant strains like Coloring Book or If You’re Reading This It's Too Late—expensive-sounding, heavily publicized albums that have as much in common with an audiobook or an app as they do a mixtape. Oso Oso’s second LP is advertised as an album about a mixtape, in the old rewind-and-record, Maxell-cassette sense. More accurately, it’s a tribute to the emotional state of mixtape-making: being dumbstruck in love, or simply being dumbstruck by the concept of love, daydreaming the lifespan of an entire relationship and actualizing it within a span of 40 minutes.

For ’00s indie rock fans, Yunahon Mixtape can be heard as a seamless Since I Left You-style collage borne from college radio crate digging between 2001-2004. It’s a veritable Easter egg hunt for brisk, Barsuk-era Death Cab for Cutie melodies, and the appropriately titled and panoramic “Great Big Beaches” stages a misty-eyed, full-hearted reshoot of “Cath…” Elsewhere, Lilitri steps outside of classic emo to practice the fastidious, ship-in-a-bottle complexity of the Shins (“The Secret Spot”), Built to Spill’s anxious prog-pop (“The Bearer of the Truths”) and the walking-wounded blues of Spoon (“The Slope”).

But prior to starting Oso Oso, Lilitri played as State Lines, a Long Island emo outfit that demonstrated an endearingly fervent dedication to bringing a certain kind of late-90s New York back in the 2010s. Oso Oso’s 2015 debut sounded like someone trying to deconstruct pop-punk, but it appears in its purest form on The Yunahon Mixtape, as a secret weapon: when things threaten to get too fastidious on “The Walk,” the second half breaks into a mad dash, while “Shoes (The Sneaker Song)” follows “Great Big Beaches” with a four-minute mile.

Lilitri is as much of a student of his influences as he is a fan, understanding the exact methods that make the sound of this music hit a certain way at a certain age and linger in the years to come. This is music that reflects a mood more often than it sets one, and the coherence of Oso Oso’s influences allows the emotional tenor to shift wildly without upsetting the flow, from drumming up the confidence to act on a crush, putting feelings out in the open, and the subsequent vertigo of awaiting reciprocation. Lilitri played everything but drums here, and the stacked harmonies and call-and-response actually enhance its insularity in a meaningful way: most mixtapes are conceptualized long before they hit the reels.

Whereas State Lines or even the first Oso Oso album had the pinched sound of teen melodrama, The Yunahon Mixtape is pure romantic comedy: meet-cutes, playful misunderstandings, inside jokes and the acoustic midpoint where three minutes apart feels like an eternity. And like most entries in this realm, Yunahon allows itself cliché as an indulgence; the very first line plays on “falling in love” as a physical pratfall and “Shoes (The Sneaker Song)” proudly wields its uber-emo sentiments.

There’s enough acidity to keep it from getting too cloying, enough specifics to keep it grounded, enough humor to make everyone feel like co-conspirators playing hooky from realistic interactions. All of this makes The Yunahon Mixtape a realization of its ambitions and completely out of step on numerous fronts. It’s understandable if the current state of affairs has completely sapped your ambition to have your head in the clouds, but damn if The Yunahon Mixtape doesn’t make a good argument for getting on Lilitri’s level.