Papercuts - You Can Have What You Want

It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book: put joy and pain in the ring and let them fight it out. Anyone who’s ever heard Burt Bacharach or The Smiths will know the power of combining the two in the same moment, and of using the tension between music and lyrics to hint at the complicated emotions beneath.

It’s a trick which Papercuts’ Jason Quever has evidently studied closely, and the result, in the case of You Can Have What You Want, is a kind of sweet, elegant melancholy. The adjective “sunny” is a music reviewing cliché, but is hard to avoid here: the shimmering, glowing organ sounds which open the album sound like sunlight streaming in the window, and the steady drums and chugging bass which follow are the aural equivalent of waves of surf rolling in to the shore. The lyrics, though - “once we walked in the sunlight/three years ago last July” – introduce a more complicated, elegiac tone, one which resurfaces again and again throughout the album. When Quever sings the lyrics of the title track, for example, the minor chord progression lends the affirmative words a strangely ominous feeling; conversely, “Dead Love” rides along on a bouncy tune that makes for a strangely uplifting experience.

The tension also comes from the conflicting musical influences at play - the songs alternate between the playfulness of 60s French pop and the more introspective melancholy of modern indie (something accentuated by Quever’s echoey, breathy, sometimes fragile vocal, not unlike that of Cass McCombs). Sonically, the album is denser than its predecessor Can’t Go Back, due to the mostly electric instrumentation and the almost ubiquitous presence of Hammond organ. The latter might show the influence of Quever’s friends Beach House (Alex Scally guests here), and “The Void” strongly recalls the Baltimore duo (at least until the drums kick in). The songs also exhibit a shoegazey faith in the power of droning, repetitive structures, and are clearly the work of a man who has spent many an hour in the company of My Bloody Valentine and the Velvets.

While the influences are sometimes obvious, though, the album rarely feels derivative, and only improves from repeated listens. The classic elements are comfortably absorbed into Quever’s individual vision, and act as a base for an ambitious and adventurous exploration of his classic, dreamy pop aesthetic: as a whole, You Can Have What You Want feels cohesive and confident, and ultimately very satisfying.