The first few albums from Portland's
Reptaliens merged hooky synth pop with intergalactic confusion, coating lyrics about conspiracy theories and alien abduction in reverb and sailing them through the cosmos on beams of warped synthesizer tones. After turning from the demented pop of their 2017 debut
FM-2030 to more focused and reined-in songwriting on 2019's
Valis, core members and married couple Bambi and Cole Browning began work on third album
Multiverse when the lockdowns for the COVID-19 pandemic were taking hold. Working just as a duo, without the help of the additional players who had appeared on earlier records and on-stage, Bambi and Cole went for a more stripped-down approach on these songs, streamlining the instrumentation and peeling back some of the woozy processing that had defined their interstellar psychedelia up to that point. Though not quite minimal, the new approach results in more immediate, straightforward songs. Album highlight "Like a Dog" finds Bambi singing the lyrics "LSD, come to me" as clear as a bell while the song's lazy, wandering instrumental grooves along like a lost track from the
Porno for Pyros album. There's some obligatory rumination on the cabin fever of lockdown on the otherwise peppy "I Feel Fine," and a series of head-spinning chord shifts that congeal into an unlikely catchiness on "Someone I Know." Even the spacey, slightly creepy atmospherics that linger on "Do You Know You Are Sleeping?" aren't to the level of blurriness that marked the band's pre-
Multiverse sound. The back-to-basics, '90s alt-rock-inspired sound of the album in no way loses any of the band's inherent experimental spirit. Strangely enough,
Reptaliens are more psychedelically strange without their usual filter of synths and production fogginess, and the bluntly odd lyrics and weird but captivating songwriting choices of
Multiverse are easier to be pleasantly puzzled by with
Reptaliens' cracked vision of pop in full view. ~ Fred Thomas