Haim’s profile just grows and grows. Since their last album, youngest sibling Alana’s starring role in Paul Thomas Anderson’s whimsical Seventies L.A. nostalgia-fest, Licorice Pizza, has done them no harm. I Quit is, the band says, thus titled because its songs are about “quitting something that isn’t working for us anymore”. More than its concept, though, the listener is swept away by the sisters’ joy in ransacking their skills and studio, any which way they can, to create sun-dappled retro-futurist pop.
This is not pop in the Gaga/Roan vein, though. Alongside ex-Vampire Weekend super-producer Rostam Batmanglij, the trio mine a very Californian seam that mingles folk, yacht rock, major label “indie”, inventive production, and a fabulous rhythmic underpinning (the drumming is fantastic, throughout). Take the boozy boyfriend blues of “Blood on the Street”, for example, wherein impressive guitar is matched to a shuffling groove that’s lazily at ease with itself, deceptively simple yet immediately involving.
It's not totally consistent. At 15 songs, it would benefit from a light cull. At its least likeable, there’s a sonic blandness akin to Wilson Phillips collaborating with Prefab Sprout. More often, though, the songs drift, unforced, to interesting, involving places, rarely working up a sweat yet maintaining a jiggling, low-level funk.
They open strong with “Gone”, a shuffle-beat roller that combines strutting self-empowerment (“I’ll do whatever I want!”) and gospel vocals invoking “Freedom”, with a song redolent of Screamadelica. Throughout, acoustic guitar strumming centres things, from the pure class M.O.R. pop of “Down to be Wrong” to the “You Can’t Always Get Want You Want” sundown-at-a-festival slayer “The Farm”. Then again, they’re equally happy dipping into all manner of genres, from the smeared, shoegazey “Lucky Stars” to the closing “Now It’s Time”, based around Gary Numan-esque synths, and originally a riff on U2’s “Numb”.
Some albums, you’re passionate about them, from the ground up, music that seems to have splurged, raw-formed, from an artist’s soul. I Quit is not such an album. It feels carefully designed (albeit with heart). But it’s so well-crafted and contains such beautifully polished pop nuggets that only the most churlish punk Jacobin will insist on resisting its highs. Haim’s talent shines bright.
Below: Watch the video for "Down to be Wrong" by HAIM
