Haim - Something To Tell You

The Guardian 80

(Polydor)
The LA trio’s second album finds them adding a bittersweet edge to their fusion of retro pop styles

With their very first album, 2013’s Days Are Gone, LA’s Haim staked out an instantly identifiable sound with depth as well as surface – something many other bands never achieve. Having located a narrow patch of ground where R&B and 1970s soft rock overlap on pop’s Venn diagram, they exploited it mercilessly. (The 80s were called into service as required.) Those distinct eras and sounds are not so anachronistic, on reflection: both Fleetwood Mac and Destiny’s Child rely heavily on multi-part harmonies and gleaming production, and Haim were – quite naturally – fans of both.

For their long-awaited second album, Haim have stuck to this sweet spot. Once again, Ariel Rechtshaid produces, busily squaring circles so that everything sounds lush, but punchy. Sure, Haim update – you can hear faint echoes of former tour-mate Taylor Swift in the title track. The finger-snapping Ready for You, meanwhile, has the vaguest hint of an 80s Jackson about it – Michael, or Janet. Largely, though, the impression of three Stevie Nickses conversant with digital production software endures.

Related: Haim: the soft-rock sisters on working hard to sound effortless

Pitchfork 78

Haim’s glossy second album is slyly complex. The California sisters remain masters of rhythm and create spacious, hook-filled pop-rock full of heartbreak, longing, and betrayal.

The Guardian 60

Haim return with another album of polished sun-soaked rock and pop perfection, which they want you to know they wrote all by themselves

In January, Este Haim offered a slightly prickly explanation for the four-year gap between her band’s debut album, Days Are Gone, and its follow-up. The delay had been caused, she noted, not just by the extensive promotion of its predecessor, or Haim’s apparent perfectionism in the studio, but because: “We write and produce everything ourselves. We don’t have producers sending songs by email.”

This statement can be viewed in a number of ways. You might argue that it tells you something about the pressure felt by a band following up a debut album that spawned six singles and featured in almost every end-of-year best-of list. A more cynical voice might suggest it says a great deal about the leisurely pace at which artists feel entitled to conduct themselves these days. It is perhaps worth comparing the Stakhanovite struggle to devise 11 serviceable new songs over the course of four years with, say, the workload undertaken by James Brown in 1966 – 12 months during which the self-styled Mister Dynamite released six albums and 13 singles, produced 16 singles for other artists and was touring almost constantly, all while singlehandedly redefining the very parameters of soul music.

Related: Haim: 'Dad would be like, Let's go and jam in the living room'

Drowned In Sound 40

Still, there exists the nagging sense that standards are falling and that the ordinary is the new extraordinary. If this is indeed a tangible thing and not an unrealistic projection based on the laments of an increasingly jaded critic – hello! - then the sisters Haim might well be the ideal standard-bearers for such a movement. Drenched in throwback power pop vibes and relatable subject matter, their brand of wholesome participation medal music clicks into requisite demographics but is nonetheless curiously devoid of any real substance.

This is the kind of music that artificial intelligence will be creating in the near future, should such dystopian chart-based horror come to pass. Sleek, polished, fine-tuned to every conceivable demand and safer than Fort Knox, Something To Tell You is less artistic expression and more laser-focused consolidation. While that may be the smartest play for a global-reaching, mainstream-satisfying second effort in 2017, it’s a quite hollow and depressing statement, but then again so too is the narrative of a record that refuses to allow for intriguing subtext.

Or much of any subtext, really. A tracklisting that throws out variations on the word ‘you’ five times in its first six utterances prompts cause for a lack of introspective concern, but hey, books and covers and all that. Dive that little bit deeper and as the sun-kissed studio-sewn strains of ‘Want You Back’ rise and fall – complete with awkward tropical house ‘flourishes’ – and you’re rewarded with a rote tale of devotion that will ultimately be contradicted by the time you get to ‘Right Now’, and while that’s unquestionably the strongest cut on offer, arriving there following an identikit barrage fails to connect as a compelling, earned arc.

You might argue that grasping for what lies beneath ignores a keenly determined focus on lean pop creations and confessional balladry, and that would be fair enough were Something To Tell You anything other than aggressively beige even during its most well-realised moments. ‘Little of Your Love’, for instance, spawned from the difficult process of meeting a time-sensitive commission for the film Trainwreck, so you can imagine how integral that one feels. Elsewhere, ‘Nothing’s Wrong’, ‘Ready For You’ and a neatly percussive title track do little to dispel the notion that Haim are little more than this decade’s answer to Heart.

Still on the surface, damning phrases like ‘studio fuckery’ and ‘production bullshit’ as voiced in a recent Rolling Stone interview prove rather bizarre when the guiding hand of Ariel Rechtshaid gets busy with just about every button and dial available, ramping up the glamour in order to mask impuissant arrangements. In this context, even the rather stripped back ‘Right Now’ fails to escape the garish parade, as there’s simply too much going on in the final mix. ‘Night So Long’, meanwhile, is so tonally off and maudlin that it might as well be called ‘Mournful Second Album Closer’.

You can see what Haim were going for throughout Something To Tell You, how this direction makes complete sense as a follow-up to the warmly received Days Are Gone. Rechtshaid has pop sensibilities for days, as do collaborators Rostam Batmanglij, Dev Hynes and Twin Shadow’s George Lewis Jr., while the masses generally lap up the ‘same but different’ thing. Something To Tell You is no disaster and you could do worse for background listening whilst tackling the ironing or something, but music really shouldn’t be quite this uninspired, nor should the artists at the helm. Catch them on the Pyramid Stage in a couple of years.