Papercuts' 2018's album Parallel Universe Blues was something of a sea change sonically for the Jason Quever-led project, replacing layers of carefully calibrated sound with home-cooked smears of reverb and more rhythmic punch. Add in some of Quever's hookiest songs and it was a career highlight. Fast-forward a few years and that mid-fi, highly melodic sound is fully intact on Past Life Regression. It's a little clearer, sharper around the edges, and less bathed in a kind of third-album VU haze. Some of it has to do with dialing down the reverb and adding more keyboards to the arrangements. "Hypnotist" is a good example of how foregrounding the fairground keys gives the song a slightly more immediate impact. Some of this is down to the pointed nature of some of the lyrics, which deal with the divisions between people that were brought further into the open due to the upheavals in society that are impossible to ignore. "I Want My Jacket Back" is a brilliant encapsulation of the feeling that happens when two people are so far apart there's nothing left to do both get your stuff and move on. Quever's brilliant stroke is to set this tale of modern woe against blindingly cheerful melodies and some almost deranged "la la las." He does something similar on album ender "Comb in Your Hair," where lyrics like "new patches on your old blue coat/one said "Live Free or Die"/it was the last time you stopped by" are contrasted with a hauntingly pretty, light shoegaze arrangement full of swerving guitars and wobbly synths. Moments like these give the melancholy some bite, while other songs -- like "My Sympathies," which adds some Baroque cello sawing to the mix -- lean more sincerely into sadness or regret. All of them feel pristine, and since he's downsized the scale of his records, Quever has few equals when it comes to this kind of sound. Parallel Universe Blues was pretty much perfect, and Past Life Regression isn't far from it. Some might even call it a coin-flip scenario.
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