With a smattering of singles and an LP in their wake, The Besties have issued their second full-length, Home Free, whose smart melodies are repeatedly and brutally undercut in a broader sense by stock nostalgia, unsuggestive genre-crossing, and fulsome overtures hatched to position the band at the inoffensive midpoint of today’s twee milieu while smuggling the popular hallmarks of punk across its borders. At its best, the record provides an escape; by and large, it enacts the most regressive tendencies of power pop, self-conscious but seldom self-aware.
Predictably, these Brooklynites are émigrés of a stripe: the founders opted out of Florida to live the dream, recorded some nice tunes with only a drum machine, and then fleshed out the band with a living, bleeding drummer from the wilds of Kings County. (No bass in these parts, incidentally, the better to grate with.) Sunshiny roots amount to a — perhaps the — mechanism propelling the band’s development, in form and content alike. Distant Florida is an easy foil to justify narratives of growing up, moving on, hitting “the road,” ditching “this town,” etc., etc. Critically, though, this facile opposite to Northeastern flint is never meaningfully banished from The Besties’ aesthetic, and as deftly as they cite, lampoon, and gingerly embrace the shouty tropes of punk, the charade is moot: these imported goods weren’t actually unknown to twee in the first place. The result is an aggressive, sort of muscular stew of subgenres whose contact is neither shocking nor coyly enlightening.
The record’s 11 tracks, then, showcase an odd lineup of contradictions, all vividly foregrounded by the production and left to implode. If here ‘punk’ is best signified by being loud — and The Besties abide by only the leanest of syllogisms to make these decisions — then the chorus seems a natural venue to air their grittier influences. On closing track “79 Lorimer,” for instance, Kelly Waldrop and Marisa Bergquist buttress peppy chants with some seriously unsubtle on-the-beat keyboard lines, and its upshot is just laughable: power pop in a brownout.
It’s not that twee must perforce be delicate, defaulting to the effete or childish. For every Cub or plouf!, there’s a rougher counterweight: a Talulah Gosh, a Henry’s Dress. All the affectations can be reversed, appropriated, or just ignored. The Besties fail in that their aggression is still hesitant, still awkward and jockeying for acceptance. They neither create nor destroy, and Home Free isn’t so much the product of artistic process as of stasis, a checkmate imposed by the anxiety of influence.
The record is perhaps most irritating when it gestures toward other Scene Veterans — again, in a purely tactical way, interpellating friends and idols just in case they might be contagious. “What Would Tim Armstrong Do?” features Home Free’s most compelling keyboard melody, but spins a lumbering treatise on the cred economy, wordy and suffused with clichés. There’s a track called “Gothenburg Handshake,” coincidentally the title of a Pains of Being Pure at Heart demo from last year.
It goes on: the middling “Nightwatch” calls out Pants Yell! in veiled but still self-inflating terms: “Like Andrew said, ‘I tried to be good.’” They’re pals, yes. PY! dwarfed The Besties at NYC Popfest last June, as did Tullycraft, a resolutely finer specimen of twee intertextuality. It’s hardly a favor, though, to lodge that tribute within a verse that devolves into “Let’s be honest with ourselves/ I really wish we could.” Aspiring insiders, The Besties mobilize such contacts to the point of absurdity, and Home Free comes off as flimsy gladhanding, always pointing beyond its own hollowness.
1. Right Band, Wrong Song
2. What Would Tim Armstrong Do?
3. Helgafell
4. Nightwatch
5. The Gothenburg Handshake
6. Birthday
7. M.F.D.
8. St. Francis
9. Julie Jane
10. Man vs. Wild
11. 79 Lorimer
More about: The Besties
