Review: Silversun Pickups's Swoon

Swoon is the second full-length album by the Silversun Pickups. Released in 2009 to a very positive critical reception, it is on the merit of this album that the band has put several videos onto MTV and generated enough excitement to tour nearly nonstop for a year and a half, a few months of which was spent in the highly coveted and prestigious company of the European force of nature Muse. So how’d they do it in just a few years, and only two records? Is Swoon really that good? What’s it even sound like?

The short answer is distorted. The long answer is that every person’s voice is different, and a lot of the time, that’s what makes or breaks the appeal of a group. How many times have you heard someone say ‘Well there’s nothing wrong with the music, but it’s this guy’s voice, I just can’t deal with it.’ Well, Silversun’s Brian Aubert’s sinister, breathy, hollow, and almost accusatory voice could have easily sunk the band’s sound for many people were it not for one very smart, risky move that the whole group made: they’ve catered the band’s entire sound to something just as sinister, breathy, and hollow so that it perfectly complements Aubert’s voice.

Swoon is very, very obviously a studio album. There isn’t a single track that doesn’t have multiple instances of overdubbing. The guitars and bass are layered so many times over that a few songs sound less like rock music, and more like a melodic amp overload, creating a truly old-school fuzz (once created by literally puncturing the speaker and allowing the vibrations to rip the rest of the device apart) in a delightfully new-school way by simply layering more and more and more tracks on top of one another, so that the miniscule differences in timing and volume eventually create an avalanche of bass that will easily bury you the first time you hear it.

So we have ourselves a very creepy-sounding, sonic attack of an album. On top of that, it isn’t a happy one, “Who would know all the reasons you’re alone?” the album begins, and song after song, until we come to the final cadence of, “Is it perfect in our little hell”, the lyrics take on one form or another of ‘Fuck you, I’m ten times the human being you are’. For anyone who is familiar with the writing style of Coheed and Cambria, this is a similar deal. Not a lot of happy and quite a lot of well written trash talking. On the same page, it’s got the same style of abstract pop, with extremely catchy and flowing melodies interjected between thundering bridges and breakdowns. It’s rock, but through a lens.

And rock it does. Silversun has only one guitarist, who is also the singer, a bassist, a keyboard player, and a drummer. But from these four instruments, they’re able to craft a massive, intricate, ambient rocking experience that’s got everything you could want: rumbling bass, crazy drumming, a bitchin’ guitar solo here and there, and the moments of softness are even more pronounced than on almost any other album you’ll find, thanks in part to the soft, breathy voice of Aubert and the ever-present echoing. The traditions of rock and roll are acknowledged and respected by Swoon, though with the band’s penchant for massively distorted overdubbing eternally present.

If you let it, Swoon will make you swoon. It’s not one of those things you’ll have to listen to over and over to really get into, but rather, you must merely accept that this is what Silversun sounds like, and that’s not changing anytime soon.