On
Circa Waves' fourth studio album, 2020's effusive and literate
Sad Happy, lead singer
Keiran Shudall confesses, "If nothing else, I'm feeling Zen." The lyric appears three tracks into the album, setting up the breezy, '70s soft rock-inflected song "Move to San Francisco" in which
Shudall dreams of heading to the Bay Area, a "pink moon" wonderland, where Mondays feel like Saturdays, and maybe his good mood will last...maybe. Produced by
Shudall with mixing from
Matt Wiggins and
Dan Grech-Marguerat,
Sad Happy is a triumphantly dualistic album. Initially released as two separate EPs, it's an album about finding yourself in that liminal space where nothing is quite wrong, but nothing is terribly right, either. Melancholy is another way to describe it (as is entering one's thirties), and it's a feeling that has dogged much of
Circa Waves' work since 2015's
Young Chasers. Where that album found them playing a cracklingly ferocious style of kinetic, garagey, post-punk that evoked a Liverpool version of
the Strokes, the band's subsequent albums have found them taking a more reflective approach. As a songwriter,
Shudall has pulled inward, toiling with depression, growing older, and struggling with messy relationships. The band has also expanded their sound since forming in 2013, weaving in piano and strings, and incorporating delicate Baroque pop and psychedelic flourishes.
Circa Waves coalesce all of these past developments on
Sad Happy, wrapping them in hooky, tightly wound chord structures that maximize their emotional impact. Cuts like "Be Your Drug" and the thrillingly catchy "Call Your Name" are ebullient dance-rock anthems imbued with a wry maturity that finds
Shudall reflecting on his twenties with the louche romanticism of a 19th century poet. On the twangy acoustic ballad "Things We Knew Last Night," he sings, "You Took the good times on the chin/Said 'Hold My Drink, I'm going in'/And ran into the open sea/Of boys and girls with broken dreams." With
Sad Happy,
Circa Waves capture the broken dreams of youth and turn them into songs meant to be played at full volume before leaving you wrecked on the floor. ~ Matt Collar
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