Mild High Club’s Brettin pulled out all the stops
Based on reviews that are partly positive and partly puzzled, there’s a pretty solid case to be made that many don’t entirely get what Alex Brettin was after with Mild High Club’s Skiptracing.
The first half of the sophomore outing places the Los Angeles–based quintet in the same neo-slacker ballpark as acts like Mac DeMarco and Mikal Cronin, both of whom the band has shared stages with. Things kick off with the languid and lovely “Skiptracing”, where Brettin’s daydream vocals are set to summer-hazed guitars and cloud-soft drums. From there, “Homage” is ’70s AM radio infused with a quarter-ounce of Acapulco Gold and “Head Out” filters soft jazz through the same sensibilities that gave birth to Ween’s The Mollusk.
Where things get really interesting, though, is on the back end of Skiptracing. Brettin serves notice that things are going to get weird halfway through the record when, in “Kokopelli”, he announces “Welcome to my twisted cabaret.” Given how many reviewers have argued the record eventually goes off the rails after an easily digestible start, it’s obvious that heads-up is getting missed.
“I really enjoyed every moment of the recording because I was pulling out all the stops,” Brettin says, on the line from a tour van wending its way through Vermont. “I was pushing myself, using stuff that I’d learned in school. I had the idea that it was going to polarize whoever listened to the record. It’s something that you can try and wrap your head around, or it’s something that’s really going to turn you off because it’s not your thing.
“Not to be elitist or anything,” he continues, “but the record can go over people’s heads if they’re not really paying attention. There are themes in there that are really meta, where I’m turning the whole process in on itself, almost having an inner dialogue with myself.”
Elaborating on that, Brettin suggests that the first half of Skiptracing finds him attempting to craft pop songs that are mini-tributes to different eras. As for the record’s home stretch, his training as a jazz musician definitely colours things, with “Whodunit” a freeform techno-colour blur of crazy drum violence, space-phaser synth bursts, and jungle-bombed percussion. “Ceiling Zero” unspools like the 5th Dimension taking a kick at the Taxi Driver soundtrack, while “Chasing My Tail” starts out as a country sleeper and ends up a peyote-drip dream.
“There’s everything from the bossa nova thing to Bach or whatever,” Brettin notes. “But things are set up the way that they are for a reason. Kokopelli is like the sage, the investigator. And once we get to ‘Kokopelli’, the sage sort of alerts the student that it’s okay to push things out, and that the record doesn’t have to be a start-to-finish banger.”
It’s worth noting that the first album Brettin ever latched on to was the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which he discovered as a small kid. Steely Dan was often in heavy rotation on his parents’ turntable, the singer also having a casual obsession with the likes of Brian Eno and Marvin Gaye. If something binds those acts together, it’s that they’re from a time when people actually made cohesive records with a start, middle, and end, as opposed to something to be chopped up into playlists on an iPod.
“When people don’t understand the back half of the record, it just means that they don’t have the patience nor the will to get through it,” Brettin argues. “I guess I don’t expect them to in this day of short attention spans and screen time and me time. The record is also for my own enjoyment. I’m interested in showing a sort of dynamic range rather than hitting the wall with things all the time. It’s okay to start in one place and end up somewhere completely different.”
Mild High Club plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Saturday (October 8).
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