Years & Years — Palo Santo ANALYSIS & REVIEW
Published 07/17/2018
Its triumphant moments of breaking away from utter monotony sadly didn’t last long enough, and what started as perhaps a hopeful modern pop album with neat ideas regarding chord usage and melodic range turned into the same old mush of market-driven crap by the end. For the first half of the work, there was reason to believe this album would rise above its surface moniker of being a collection of short shelf-life radio pop by the use rhythmically driven harmonic progressions with unique chord patterns that strayed away from repetitive four-chord catastrophe. “Hallelujah” used a semi-interesting i-VI-iv rhythmic pattern as its basis, and “All For You” used a less frequent ii chord instead of IV while providing good delivered syncopation. Decisions to use chords other than I, IV and V were vital and made a huge difference, as it brought important color and heightened mood to the very repetitive and otherwise overly predictable nature. Those moments of harmonic strength were the greatest parts of the album, and harmony did indeed drive the structure and skeleton of each song.
Unfortunately, that also meant it drove the music into the ground at times when failing to provide enough unique deviation and becoming a four-chord catastrophe. The four songs from “Rendezvous” to “Lucky Escape” were recipes for harmonic disaster: syncopation became watered down rudimentary and boring patterns that weren’t any better than strong beat accents, and no real surprise in movement from chord to chord as progressions became fixed on sounding tailor-made to this decade’s pop sound over having individuality. On top of that, it didn’t fix the existing structural mistake of having little to no phrase development, so the music was again stuck with repeating its exposition over and over again. Those four songs got rid of the one truly positive thing the music had going for it while maintaining the same stale forms. Then the title track “Palo Santo” came out of nowhere with a refreshing harmonic layer using the borrowed chord IV in a minor mode, which reminded me of the strength the album once had but was too late, and still too developmentally lacking, to make up for it.
Although I didn’t mind that the harmony had such a big spotlight throughout the work, as it gave the best moments, the melodies really should have been on par with them and done more to separate itself as a crucial entity rather than being simple ear candy. At times it was acceptable, as it did have some nicely shaped phrases in landing on a less expected and more directional chord tone, like the ending on “sol” in the chorus to “Sanctify” or the consonant rising and falling in the song “Hypnotized”. More often than not, though, the melody was echoing the harmony by using a plethora of repetitions on rather tame, uninteresting pitch collections and rhythms that were understandably active yet not very fulfilling in terms of chosen accents.
It was quite unfortunate that the one songwriting strength was not used throughout, however it still wouldn’t have amounted to much overall due to the music being shrouded under a blanket of rather cheap, bleak, think electronic textures and cringe-worthy backup vocal additions at all too obvious moments that screamed “we’re doing this for the money”. Admittedly, the timbre did include several innocent and amicable synth additions that positively affected the overall bright energy and intended emotion. The biggest problem was that the texture simply wasn’t rich enough to really sell that emotion full on, and these synths were not pleasing enough on their own to create an enjoyable atmosphere by themselves. On top of that, the two songs “If You’re Over Me” and “Lucky Escape” went quite wayward in their sound with weak bell tones and odd vocal additions that held absolutely no interest on their own. This album got close to salvaging something of worth, but overall, it’s nothing more than another radio pop disappointment. Having only one specific strength and only using it half the time simply doesn’t cut it.
