
It’s sometimes hard to remember that Beabadoobee is still in her mid-twenties or even that’s been a mere six years since she bounded onto the scene with her dandy debut album, Fake It Flowers. There’s a fullness to her presence, a pervasiveness to her charm, and a certainty to her talent that makes it seem like Beabadobee been around for ages, defining the indie rock ecosystem as much as anyone. The sensation is certainly bolstered by the fact that she’s been fairly prolific compared to many of her peers, springing new albums onto the populace every two years and scattering tremendously good stand-alone singles along the way. Among the many modern queens of indie, Beabadoobee is an attentive and benevolent one.
Pylon, Beabadoobee’s fourth studio album, is a grand dispatch to the kingdom. After keeping matters fairly modest on her previous albums, she throws quite the party here. Including herself, there are nine credited producers on the album, and she has songwriting collaborators on most of the tracks. Hayley Williams lends some of her brash-pop sensibility to the collaborative cut “Nothing to Prove,” and Brendan Yates, of Turnstile, pitches in with vocals on the mid-tempo “Powerlines.” Through it all, the quality is tightly controlled and the style if fully in line with what Beabadoobee has already established. The expansiveness is less reinvention that fortification. Beabadoobee gathers a crowd to show exactly what she she can do.
What she can do is make terrific, encompassing pop songs. The punchy, insistent single “Sun Has Set” is a good example of her creative strength and paradoxically good-natured brashness (“When I say, We’ll never be friends’/ I mean, we’ll never pretend/ Fuck that, you can never run back to me now/ The sun has set”). She can make music that is impressively full (“In Motion”) or warm and intimate in a manner that calls to mind the Sundays (“Write Me a Letter,” “Memories”). I’m also fond of the jagged, probing “Switchblade” and the melancholy singalong of “Spark” (“What was I thinking? I was playing with a spark/ How it flickers in the dark/ It’s nothing much, but it’s a start”).
Fittingly, the album begins and ends with cuts that seem to pack all of Beabadoobee’s many tricks into single packages. The opening title cut has starts with the elegant piano and fragile steeliness of vintage Tori Amos before expanding into a messier, more wondrous tangle on the bridge, and “Satellite” veers and swerves with joyful confidence. Beabadoobee has been at this music thing for a while; Pylon shows that there’s still so much she can do.
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