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ESSENTIAL NEW MUSIC

Essential New Music: Flock Of Dimes’ “If You See Me, Say Yes”

flockofdimes

If Dungeonesse offered a lightweight (albeit inspired) sparkle of dance-pop dress-up, and Wye Oak’s Shriek was a satisfying but largely subdued sonic retooling of her hitherto guitar-centric main outfit, this feels like the payoff. It’s the moment that Jenn Wasner (like Caroline Polachek before her) fully embraces and inherits the spirit of the diva-auteurs from the first synthetic era: Bush, Siberry, Lennox, Moyet, Anderson, Thorn—artists who harnessed then-burgeoning technology to their indelible voices to explore new, fertile musical vistas balancing invention and expression, steeped in wisdom, intelligence and warmth.

If You See Me, Say Yes is rich and expansive in similar ways. It’s pop—often of the lush, sweetly swoony variety, with no shortage of artful, incisive hooks—but it also encompasses soul, lounge, hypnotic minimalism and other, less-definable forms. It’s electronic but unbound by any convention in its openness to textural possibility (making room for pedal steel, saxophone and abundant guitar) and rhythmic range (including plenty of typically Wasnerian metric irregularities). It’s an immediate, obvious highlight of Wasner’s career, and of the year. We see you, Jenn: a thousand times yes!

—K. Ross Hoffman