Top Albums of 2012, 5-3

Part Two of Three.  Thanks for caring.

5. PASSION PIT - Gossamer.  Although it retains the schizophrenic electronica and otherworldly vocals from Manners, Passion Pit's sophomore album sounds wholly unlike its superb predecessor.  As I discovered earlier this year, Manners layers sugary pop music over its devastating lyrics, allowing, perhaps even gesturing, a listener to dance unwittingly to Angelakos's deepest miseries: "you've caused all this pain / and you proudly shame / your whole family's name," he sings on the infectious "Little Secrets."  Yet Gossamer refuses to bury its pain, making for a surprisingly confrontational listen following the superficially joyous Manners.  While a song like "I'll Be Alright" revels in its maximalist approach, from crashing percussion to layers of synths to those glitchy, chipmunk vocals, it's nevertheless hard to miss Angelakos admitting: "I drink a gin and take a couple of my pills . . . I'll be alright."

"I'll Be Alright" leads into the insipid "Carried Away," but then the album picks up with "Constant Conversations," where Passion Pit  pares down its electronic eccentricities to offer something that is both straightforward and rewarding.  By removing these sonic layers, though, PP forces its listeners to confront Angelakos' morbid lyrics, which ominously recall the self-deprecation and helplessness found in Elliott Smith's bleakest songs:

"Well you're wrapped up in a blanket, and you're staring at the floor.
The conversation's moderated by the noisy streets below.
'I never wanna hurt you baby. I'm just a mess with a name and a price.
And now I'm drunker than before; they told me drinking doesn't make me nice.'"

Yet when Angelakos implores, "Everybody now! Oh-oh-oh-oh-ohhh-oh-ohhh.  Sing it now!," you want to sing along and forget what you've just heard -- to be like Angelakos and conceal his pain with melodies and songs and noise.  "Conversations" then leads to my favorite song, "Mirrored Sea," where the depths of sound return.  In one of the most gripping intros I can ever remember, "Sea" opens with a wave of ghostly synths which then bleed into the frenetic keys on the verse.  These discrete parts ultimately intersect at the chorus in the album's best moment.  Sounding like a gothier track from the Manners sessions, "Mirrored Sea" marks a return to PP's opaque lyrics (what's a mirrored sea?) and vocal delivery, though delving deeper reveals some of Angelakos' most illuminating poetry: "He could look good in the light and look bad in the dark / Good men are scarce and few / But always passing through."  

For a few months I stopped listening to Gossamer, thinking it failed to live up to Manners.   Maybe the change from album to album seemed to drastic, or maybe I couldn't handle delving into Angelakos's miseries while reading stuff like Hiroshima and "The Tell-Tale Heart" (but now I can, Merry Christmas!).  But Gossamer is a great album, a more than worthy follow-up to Manners.  And for all its painful moments, Gossamer still stresses its exuberant music over its sad lyrics, like on "Hideway," which starts with staticky, fragmented vocals and then speeds into a huge chorus that commands as much dancing as it does headbanging.  It's a warm, flickery, and all-around pretty song with an encouraging chorus, "someday everything will be okay"--words we so badly want to believe, even if the album gives us a hundred reasons to think otherwise.