Local Natives: Hummingbird

     
          Frenchkiss / Infectious Music // 2012
          Dropped by Robert Miller

Music from this album
Local Natives: “Breakers”

Local Natives released an album in 2010 that was donned as a “mostly successful” effort. Without topping charts, without shaking foundations, they mustered up an afro-pop rock release with comparisons to all of the buzz bands you can think of from the mid- to late-naughts—Vampire Weekend, Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, et al. Hummingbird is the 2013 follow-up to their Gorilla Manor release from almost exactly three years ago to the day. It leads the L.A.-based quartet into pensive, despondent, dreary and plain old high-and-dry sad territory. If frontman Taylor Rice (or, really, any present band member) didn’t experience some life-altering break up in the past couple years or so, I’d have to simply congratulate him on his insightful acting abilities via lyrics.

This is the break up album you’ve always been hoping for—well, if that’s something you hope for. The fading synthesizer whir of opener “You & I” floats in the background of Peter Silberman-esque falsettos sporadically thrown into a pool of reverberating guitar strums. “When did your love grow cold?” it goes. It’s the start of an album laced with longing and searching for failure. Forlorn depression, heavy breathing, haunted faces burned in the ceiling are only a fraction of the troublesome sad-sack tropes in Hummingbird‘s liner notes.

The couple tracks you may already be familiar with, “Heavy Feet” and “Breakers,” remain the standout tracks of this hip indie-friendly release. And like any good current dream-pop album, the songs benefit from a carefully paced build up of layers of culminating attributes which eventually lead into a grand finale. These singles follow their respective blueprints to a “T” and largely benefit from the dedication to formula. On the other hand, most of the tracks in between sort of saunter between blase and just altogether forgettable.

Hummingbird is even more than a break up album, though. It’s as if it’s a diary taken straight from the core of the band’s teenage heart. “I keep on calling just to get the machine,” goes “Three Months.” It’s like a spiraling hopeless world of infinite heartbreak that we’ve all experience before, but desperately wish to never experience again. It even comes with guilt, blame and regret all in the form of the simple, straightforward piano-driven “Colombia.” “Every night I ask myself,” sings Rice, “Am I loving enough?” And this track is inevitably followed by the album closer “Bowery,” where Rice takes his emotional turmoil from the 10 tracks before and morphs it into a more empirical, distant look at love and loss as a whole.

It’s an interesting finale to the album, as the first 10 tracks built upon themselves, developing very personal and specific anecdotes of pain, loss and suffering through heartbreak. Someone named “Patricia” is even called out by name on “Colombia.” But in the end, Local Natives takes a step back to look at how losing the one you love can affect anyone’s life. Hummingbird is, obviously, a personal album to the band. They seemed to reach further inward than they did with the largely upbeat Gorilla Manor, and while diving deeper and getting personal is usually a great move for an artist, Hummingbird sticks to tired tropes a little too often. It’s the LiveJournal of a 15-year-old boy that never quite refined or focused the run-on sentence he calls “pain and heartbreak.”

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Watch the music video for Local Natives’ “Breakers” single below: