Ever since the success of 2006’s Carnavas, the Silversun Pickups have had a hard time leaving the safety of their comfort zone. Without slipping completely into self-parody, each of the Los Angeles-based rock band’s subsequent releases has seen them tempering their winning formula with only cautious variations on Brian Aubert’s breathy, quavering vocals and their thick Gaussian blur of sonic distortion and reverb. The group’s dalliance with Depeche Mode-style synth-pop on 2015’s Better Nature boasted tantalizing moments of sparkling elegance and pulse-racing throttle, but its dependence on booming yet generically applied electronics left the album feeling vacant, even lethargic.
Enter Butch Vig. For a band that can’t quite quit its love for ‘90s alternative rock, their choice to enlist the production wizard behind Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, Garbage, and the Foo Fighters seems only fitting. But their fifth album, Widow’s Weeds, is anything but a sentimental rehash of the good ol’ days. Instead, the album profits mightily from the veteran producer’s ability to transition established acts into more mature, self-assured iterations of themselves, without scrapping the essence of what made those bands great in the first place.
Widow’s Weeds thus grants us backstage access to the band at its most vulnerable and personal, but also its most clear-eyed and intrepid. After years of lackluster reviews and a string of personal struggles, the Silversun Pickups were perfectly poised for renewal and, as Aubert croons on “Don’t Know Yet,” the band has worked hard to “reboot the machine.” Under Vig’s steady hand, they’ve stripped away the stylistic accretions of their previous albums and come up with a much tighter, more identifiably rock sound. From its opening notes, the album presents a band brimming with reclaimed confidence and vitality, one that need no longer take refuge behind endless waves of feedback and sonic distractions.
| A1 | Neon Wound |
| A2 | It Doesn't Matter Why |
| B1 | Freakazoid |
| B2 | Don't Know Yet |
| B3 | Straw Man |
| C1 | Bag Of Bones |
| C2 | Widow's Weeds |
| C3 | Songbirds |
| D1 | Simpatico |
| D2 | We Are Chameleons |
