Bottom line: Swoon is
“an album so exhaustedly smooth it almost blends together.”
I first listened to the Silversun Pickups album Swoon after I was recommended the band by a friend on Discord. I didn't initially love the whole album, however I immediately fell in love with Catch & Release1, and this was my gateway to the rest of the album over time.
It took me until last December to start listening through the rest of their discography in-depth. As I had liked Swoon so much, I never felt the need. From Pikul and Carnavas I found a great well of emotion. From Physical Thrills a melancholic ever-after.
Swoon is an album so exhaustedly smooth it almost blends together. It took me dozens or hundreds of listens to really appreciate each song, and I still haven't individually loved all of them. My favorites are Catch & Release, Sort Of, The Royal We, It's Nice to Know You Work Alone, Panic Switch of course- However none of these have that same raw feeling as Kissing Families, Well Thought Out Twinkles, or Rusted Wheel. The whole album feels like it's from someone a few years after they felt everything, when intensity has dried out overnight. When the feelings being how they are becomes a matter of fact. Brian Aubert felt all this through his 20s and finally got to write the songs on those feelings he'd wanted. By the time we get to Swoon, he's still that guy, but he's in his 30s, it's turned from gut-wrenching reality into landscape of the days after.
If Swoon is anguish turned into landscape, then Pikul and Carnavas are thrashing that I think it'd be impossible to listen to forever without becoming the type of strung out, sleepless person, capable of writing Panic Attack.
The heights of yearning found in Kissing Families and Well Thought Out Twinkles are never reached again at such volume. The closest we ever come is well after life has retracted into death and become something else, something weirder. Songs like Alone on a Hill and Hereafter are expressions of the yearning when time has passed and you've been replaced with someone who wakes up with 10hr of sleep on a Saturday, someone we all with these longings have to become eventually if we're to keep getting up in the morning.
Physical Thrills is an album which has been through the maelstrom of experience for long enough that a lot of it doesn't make it past the visual cortex.
Anyone who spends enough time under the attack of endless meaningless experience,
when narratives have been picked up,
told,
believed,
and broken again and again so many times that the pattern seeking parts of the brain start to return ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticons when queried,
eventually concludes some variation on "the only thing that matters is the connections I felt for something along the way".
Physical Thrills understands this.
Much the same as the anime Flip Flappers.
When I play Swoon the sky2 cycles through colors fractalizing into shapes until it's a soft pink static. Straight edges bend together and towards themselves until my world is only halls of fun-house selves and all structure is lost. And when the album ends shape returns through the silence of a fire engine in the distance.