Sylvan Esso — What Now

Loma Vista | discogs.com

Deeply cynical pop that flips every cliché on its head

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“All you’ll hear is sound /
And all you’ll feel is sound /
And all you’ll be is sound”

From those very first lines, sharpening into focus through a haze of synth and static, What Now demands to be heard. Sylvan Esso are all pith and zero juice: seconds in, they have already declared a sensory monopoly and summarily dismissed their competitors as mere background noise.

All the blips and chirps and electronic crenulations vaguely suggest a resuscitated Postal Service, but the resemblance is only skin-deep. Instead of anxious, flickering idiosyncrasies, What Now hems much closer to the great mass of harmless, centrist pop music that it so viciously parodies. That sweet introversion at the heart of the Postal Service has been scalpelled out, and in its place has festered something icy and bitter. “I was gonna die young,” smirks the album’s most cutting chorus. “I had a plan / You ruined it completely.”

There is much to be said for a simple manifesto, and Sylvan Esso have proudly asserted theirs:

“It’s a rigged game /
And I know how to win it”