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Review: Fear Of Men, 'Fall Forever'

Note: NPR's First Listen audio comes down after the album is released. However, you can still listen with the Spotify playlist at the bottom of the page.


Fear Of Men, <em>Fall Forever</em>
/ Courtesy of the artist
/
Courtesy of the artist
Fear Of Men, Fall Forever

"Island," a highlight from Fear Of Men's new album Fall Forever, opens with a string of warped, looping sighs before fanning out into a string of swoonily propulsive pop choruses. At times, the effect is reminiscent of the early-'90s Britpop band The Sundays, albeit with a darker, more subtly discordant underbelly. "Island" is, after all, a song about independence and solitude — "Been dreaming of no one for so long," Jessica Weiss sings at one point — but the overall sound is distinctly inviting.

That dichotomy — welcoming vs. distancing — runs throughout Fall Forever, the English band's second album and follow-up to 2014's terrific Loom. Typically, the distancing manifests itself in Weiss' ambivalent words, while the arrangements that surround her billow and bloom. A song like "Island" ultimately feels both personal and universal, as it captures the way getting older pushes you to carve out your own identity even as internal and external forces push you toward others.

Elsewhere on Fall Forever, darkness and light fuse to form multifaceted gems like "Trauma," a buzzing nugget of gloomy accusation that nevertheless shimmers with a strange kind of buoyancy. Like the rest of this brisk, moody collection, it pulls the listener in several directions at once, only to land on a sweet spot every time.

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Stephen Thompson is a writer, editor and reviewer for NPR Music, where he speaks into any microphone that will have him and appears as a frequent panelist on All Songs Considered. Since 2010, Thompson has been a fixture on the NPR roundtable podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour, which he created and developed with NPR correspondent Linda Holmes. In 2008, he and Bob Boilen created the NPR Music video series Tiny Desk Concerts, in which musicians perform at Boilen's desk. (To be more specific, Thompson had the idea, which took seconds, while Boilen created the series, which took years. Thompson will insist upon equal billing until the day he dies.)