Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Visions"

Letting Up Despite Great Faults practically monopolize the market for great, fuzzy, summer pop. This is saying something in an era where making a photo pretty involves using a washed out filter, where making pop music involves similar haze, where a band actually named itself Washed Out. Put another way, in the last three years lo-fi synth pop was to indie rock what drone strikes were to American foreign policy: ubiquitous, effective and debatably good. But, remarkably, LUDGF avoided sounding predictable, even if they trafficked the same territory as so many other bands. Perhaps it was their album art which frequently featured isolated appendages of what you imagine are quite attractive brunette girls, or perhaps, more importantly, it was their ability to drive their sonics under a layer of fuzz but never to lose the hooks and melodies that mark the boundaries of good pop music. On "Visions," the lead track from forthcoming LP, Untogether, the band features the same methodical guitar, fuzzy synthesizers and a satisfying launch sequence as the band tumbles into the body of the arrangement. It sounds exactly like everything else, and still manages a certain singularity in a sea of bands held under the water and neatly browned in the sun.