A good pop album is one where you know the lyrics by the time of your second listen. A great pop album is one where you catch yourself singing the songs alone. With that in mind, Think About Life’s debut album Family is the best pop album since 2006’s Alright, Still by Lily Allen.
It’s really tough to write about this album because my initial instinct is to just grab you by the shirt and shove headphones on you and blast the album until you’ve danced yourself to a state of ecstatic collapse. It’s dance music for daylight. Pool parties, patio lounges, block parties, where you and a thousand of your closest friends are throwing your hands to the air, screaming along as the varied voice of Martin Cesar compels you forward moving your body past the point of exhaustion.
Graham Van Pelt (keyboards), Caila Thompson-Hannat (bass) and Greg Napier (drums) provide Cesar’s very dynamic backing music. Together Think about Life create a hybrid of heavily sampled and looped melodies that are backed with live instrumentation providing a textured approach to their sound; a sound that varies wildly.
While the album is heavily loaded with pure pop dance perfection like “Joanna”, “Having My Baby” and “Nueva Nueva” there are also driven, darker almost introspective tracks. “Life of Crime’s” lyrics conflate criminal activity and being in love and a harpsichord stabs away at the listener before the song deconstructs itself stripping all but the sound of guitar picks dragging themselves across the guitar strings and orchestral strings singing almost to themselves before even these elements disappear and the song ends. It’s a wonderful bit of breathing space on an album that had heretofore only wanted to make you dance.
What this album reminds me of the most was the recent attempt to reintroduce freestyle. Freestyle was dance music born in Latin American urban communities in the 1980s sharing roots in disco then emergent Hip Hop. Strong beats, liberal use of samples, and heavy bass elements with diva style female vocals or rapping but at a pace a bit faster than typical Hip Hop. It enjoyed success for a bit until House music brought back overseas from the UK in the 90s pushed Freestyle back underground where it continued to percolate.
About five years ago while the rave scene was dancing to electroindie, some producers were reintroducing the music of their youths. Freestyle was creeping back into mainstream pop songs and dance songs alike. However, there wasn’t a big enough hook to pull the rest of the dance scene with it, and freestyle continues largely out of sight of the general populace.
Family contains all of freestyle’s best elements. Heavy beats, soaring vocals, samples, strong rhythms, and a great pop sensibility. Yet it is no retro throwback threshing old styles over and over again.
Think about Life’s Family is as alive as summer in Central Park. Each song flows into the next creating a strong album varied enough to show that the band is daring enough to be more than just dance pop while being consistent enough in tone and tenor showing they are focused throughout this release. I honestly don’t know how else to say this. Get this album. Play it. Smile. When the album is done, listen again and this time singing along. Thinking about Life. Thinking about Family.