Porches: The House Album Review | Pitchfork

On his 2016 release Pool, Aaron Maine swapped out the ramshackle guitar rock that had so far come to define his primary project Porches for a glitzy set of homemade beats. He applied the songwriting skills he had picked up as the leader of an indie band to an entirely new setting, one which allowed him to indulge the paranoia that had lurked around the edges of Porches so far, but never quite come to the forefront. The House, the third studio LP to Porches name, furthers the exploration of the tension between how youre seen and how you feel, but never quite locks into the kind of groove that made Pool so satisfying.

In its tightest moments, The House boasts some of the most gripping tracks Maine has ever released as Porches. Find Me vaults forward with a techno punch as it examines the psychological layout of overwhelming anxiety, the kind that traps you indoors, away from the party, deep in your own head. I think that Ill stay inside/If you dont think that theyd mind/I cant let it find me, Maine sings, the usual disaffection in his voice cracked by what sound like raw nerves. While he never exactly specifies what the it is thats hunting him, the blooming instrumentation fills in the gaps. Theres a second voice echoing his own, pitched-up and pixelated, more alien and broken than any of the backing characters heard in Porches songs before. The voice repeats Maines words but garbles them, like Kiiaras gobbledygook chorus on the 2016 hit Gold, which only sharpens the tension. Its like Maine is speaking and has no idea if anyone is hearing what he thinks hes saying, the gap between his intention and his reception growing unfathomably, unmanageably wide.

Find Me also includes the closest thing The House has to a pure pop hook, an indelible chorus complete with chirps of synth horns thats probably the catchiest thing Porches has put out since 2013s ecstatically nonsensical Townie Blunt Guts. But where Maine once favored the irreverent, he now leans toward the sincerely soul-searching, which can be touching or tepid depending on the song. The spare, lovely Country deals in simple imagery: a loved one caught in a pristine moment while swimming in a lake. Can you make it light?/Can you do no harm? Break the water with your arms, Maine sings. While oblique, his lines rest solidly enough on a single vision that they hit home; you can almost be where hes been, which makes empathizing with the moment all the easier. But many lyrics on the album get tangled up in the immaterial and the cliche, like Maine is trying to talk his way out of an ambiguous feeling and never quite getting there. It is good to know ourselves/Because most of the time/I have no idea/Who I see in the mirror, Maine pronounces on By My Side, reiterating a visual metaphor already sung threadbare by Michael Jackson and Christina Aguilera, for starters. The scattershot instrumentals accompanying him dont help his case much; hes singing in circles, both lyrically and melodically, and the syrupy beats hes laced together struggle to get off the ground.

Punctuating The Houses actual songs are occasionally baffling interludes (one, keren, is sung entirely in Norwegian, a first for Porches), which play more like unfinished sketches than intentional moments of quiet. On Understanding, Maines father guests on the track and warbles vaguely about love over honeyed synth chords; on Swimmer, MIDI arpeggios cycle behind Auto-Tuned vocals for just under a minute. These tracks dont get anywhere, and they add little to their surroundingstheyre not portholes into Maines songwriting process so much as theyre the dregs thereof. Breaking up finished songs with undercooked ones can sometimes work as a sequencing strategy, but The House, especially in its B-side, barely has any momentum to break up. Aside from Ono, whose muscle does, eventually, kick in, the albums second half tends to stagnate, circulating the same water metaphors Maine might have put to use on Pool. When The House ends on a stanza mostly lifted from Roy Orbison (Anything you want/Anything you need/Anything at all), it feels like a fitting enough synecdoche for the bulk of the album: a reiteration, slowed down and sapped of its original spark, familiar enough to go down easy but not quite spirited enough to get the current flowing again.

Correction: An original version of this article misidentified the singer on the song Understanding.

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Porches: The House Album Review | Pitchfork