“Red, red apple/Pretty, pretty pear.” No, I am not transcribing a baby sensory video. I am quoting “There You Go Again,” a highlight from Sam and Louise Sullivan’s playful third album, Love and Devotion. Still, the Philadelphia brother-sister duo have more in common with those YouTube Kids-approved clips than most upstart folk bands you’ll catch at Philly venue Johnny Brenda’s or at Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival: Their songs burst with bright colors and smiling fruit. I hear the bossa nova classic “Waters of March” in their windy stream of consciousness, but where that song, or more recent ones like Big Thief’s “Not,” may veer from simple pleasures into darker territory, Love and Devotion is happy to stay the middle.
The middle ground can be a worthwhile frontier, as evinced by the mellow, incense-scented soft rock of an album like Clairo’s Charm, and the Sullivans explore that same blissful, lived-in palette. (Sam recently told Paste that they are attempting to split the difference between Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade” and the Beatles.) In “There You Go Again,” Sam repeats, “It’s been red, red apples” until it transforms into, “It’s been wet, wet weather.” As if playing a game of telephone with himself, he summons a fuguelike, psychedelic perception of the everyday, which is exactly what good pop music should do. On opener “Down on Love,” the duo bounces off the sensory overload of modern dating: “Can’t explain why I wasted the space in my brain/Trying to memorize all your stuff.” Here’s folk-pop for a post-Hinge world where we can read our crush’s Letterboxd and see what they ate on Beli before even meeting.
No score yet, be the first to add.
The Sullivans’ sparse, slightly surreal arrangements take an economic approach. On “Down on Love,” Sam’s lead guitar is accompanied by drum machine and bass, both performed by Rubber Band Gun’s Kevin Basko, which shoot skyward when Louise joins for the chorus. The title track is adorned by a trumpet line played by Sam and harmonies between the siblings. It’s chemistry they’ve honed through an early childhood spent singing folk songs along Oregon’s Tualatin River, and their adolescence in New York, where they performed Irish traditional music with their parents, even playing Carnegie Hall.
Basko’s direct-to-tape production shines just like it did on Star Moles’ Highway to Hell, on which Sam played guitar and Louise sang vocals. Basko, who founded the Historic New Jersey label in his South Philly basement studio, is an analog perfectionist who has played in Foxygen, written songs for a superhero TV show, and released four solo albums last year. His attention to detail is evident in the album’s front-and-center tracking, which sounds effortless but reveals new layers when he chops and screws the outro to “There You Go Again” or patches in Emily Moales’ Moog synthesizer on “After All These Years.”
Love and Devotion sounds as warm and familiar as a record scored from the dollar crate, but the siblings are so deft at channeling nostalgia that they occasionally succumb to its current. The middle stretch of songs lags, particularly the rollicking honky tonk of “Since I Left” and the moralizing Laurel Canyon drag “Doing Time,” which buries Louise’s nimble Irish fiddle. They sound strongest when they defamiliarize their influences and subjects rather than rendering them photo-realistically. They’re in the right city to do that; subverted nostalgia is all over Philly, in torchbearer Alex G’s Headlights, @’s unpredictable folk, and even Shinetiac’s eclectic mix of dub techno and core-core. The Sullivans are still experimenting, too. On the album’s synth-laden closer, “Treehugger,” the lyrics shift from describing a TSA search into a dance routine then finally an awestruck ode to family. Love and Devotion’s best affections don’t follow logic.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
