Say Anything seemed to be a pretty innocuous movie when I, at sixteen, first sat down to watch it. I expected the traditional Cameron Crowe fare, a light and easy journey through some character-building and life-affirming conflict. After all, it was just John Cusack falling in love through the soft filter of the 80′s. I wasn’t sensitive to sentimentality; stories of romance never made me weak at the knees. I thought I was completely safe.
Instead, I found myself completely, unnervingly stirred by it. The content itself may have not been startling, but the intensity of emotion that came with it, that hid underneath all the sleek and teen-friendly surfaces, was so visceral, the optimism so honest and forthwith—that I was in a state of distraction for hours afterward. It was like a mild flu, one that never truly becomes a full-blown illness, but still rattles your nerves, making its presence subtly, but uncannily known.
It seems more than fitting, then, that the lush and gauzy pop that comprises Pure Bathing Culture‘s new album Moon Tides sounds like it could be coming out of Lloyd Dobler’s car radio as he and Diane Court have yet another emotionally taxing interaction. It certainly makes me feel the same way as those cinematic moments charged with youthful feeling did.
Just like Say Anything, Moon Tides at first seems like a leisurely float down a river of relaxing sensation. The tempos are set at a soothing mid-tempo drawl, and the guitar sounds support my contentment like a hammock that is taut, but not tense. The vocal melodies often sound like (and less often evolve into) simple, pastoral rounds such as those sung by young children in choirs who are receiving their first lessons in the workings of harmony. It is all so “fine,” or, “good,” and I am not using these words in their most common function—that is, as a flippant, thinly-veiled dismissal. I mean when you tell someone you are “fine,” and you feel that warm sense of security and ease when you recognize that this time, you are being completely honest. There is nothing wrong.
And yet, underneath that haze of general well-being, there is some kind of restless, more ardent emotion endeavoring to get through. It hides within certain strong strums of the guitar, on downbeats that quietly crash into the subconscious. It is that near-transparent aura that clings around the sanguine center, that makes this album more impressionable and more affecting than it first seems, that makes me feel as crazily, paradoxically, emotional as I did the first time that I watched Say Anything.
Moon Tides is out now via Memphis Industries (UK) & Partisan Records (US).
