Never Really Been into It

Album review

"It won't make sense until tomorrow," Renee Mendoza sings at one point on Never Really Been Into It, a lyric that sums up Ashrae Fax's long tail success story. A band in the unique position of being both too late and ahead of their time, Ashrae Fax were devotees of late-'80s/early-'90s dream pop in the late '90s and early 2000s whose music didn't get its due until the late 2000s and early 2010s. Their self-released 2003 debut, Static Crash, earned a strong cult following organically, leading to its reissue on Mexican Summer a decade later, as well as the release of this collection. Never Really Been Into It is nearly as untethered by time as its predecessor: in the wake of Static Crash's re-release, Mendoza and guitarist Alex Chesney re-recorded some of their earliest demos, and the combination of experience and youthful experimentation on these tracks makes them makes them just as intriguing as the duo's debut, albeit in slightly different ways. As on Static Crash, Ashrae Fax's songs balance pop and avant-garde elements in spontaneous amounts, but this time the duo's wildness comes to the fore as much as its ethereal beauty. "The Big Lie"'s piercing keyboards and urgent beat, coupled with Mendoza's wail, are much rawer and more driven than anything on their debut; "Hurricanes in a Jar" tempers its hooky melody with a dense, surreal arrangement -- including saxophone -- that sounds like several songs playing at once. Even the more straightforward songs rarely stay still, such as the churning-then-glowing "Intexus" and "Dreamers Tied to Chairs," which begins as one of Ashrae Fax's most faithful channelings of the Cocteau Twins' glassy beauty before switching to a frantic pace two-thirds of the way through. Even more so than on Static Crash, Mendoza's voice is the heart of the duo's music, with soulful lows and silvery highs that breathe life into songs processed into wispy ethereality. Never Really Been Into It provides plenty of proof that her vocals are still more powerful and expressive than many of her contemporaries from the 2000s or 2010s: "Fits and Starts" puts the whole sweep of her range on display, while her confident delivery on "CHKN" and "You Make Me Question My Mind (In a Thousand Words About Time)" makes them standouts. While Never Really Been Into It is slightly less accessible than Static Crash, it's also a more ambitious set of songs from a group whose music falls somewhere in between bewildering and bedazzling.

© Heather Phares /TiVo