Caught in the Carousel

Mixel Pixel

Let's be Friends
Mental Monkey

Mixel Pixel

Mixel Pixel's purportedly platonic sixth full-length release reviles romance in an attempt to focus on one life's other pleasures: friendship. Let's Be Friends sets out to cover this topic in excruciating minutiae. Against a backdrop of poppy synthesizer and precocious percussion, the trio of Rob Corradetti, Matt Kaukeinen, and Kaia Wong offer up eleven songs about everything from their cats to their favorite sweatshirt.

Driven by detail and grounded in pop, Mixel Pixel are fond of using lists. Sometimes this technique is catchy, as in "Favorite Sweatshirt"—the listener can't help but get lines like "Walkman walking Mixtape talking" and the rather clever "Painted whiteout Catholic whiteout / Sisters go to the prom" stuck in his/her head. Other times, the combination of details results in awkward thematic tension. "Sinking Feeling," a song that begins with a discussion of aquarium life and then goes on to group together "Puffy stickers," "Frenchy ticklers" and "cats in the sun," can't quite decide whether it belongs at Toys-R-Us, the porn store, or the animal shelter—the arrangement is not only clumsy, it's a bit disturbing. Bands that have honed the craft of songwriting know how to deliberately undermine a song's innocence with subtle, carefully-timed innuendo (think The Magnetic Fields, or early Belle & Sebastian); even after five other albums and some E.P.s, Mixel Pixel are not yet one of those bands. With their staccato punctuation and other awkward transitions, they continually draw attention to their details, often to their detriment. That self-indulgence ultimately becomes one of the album's major weaknesses.

Given that sex sells, and that even many purportedly "indie" artists don tighter jeans in a fervent effort to sell more records, you do have to give Mixel Pixel some credit for tackling nontraditional, less sexual relationships. But those aren't exactly a novel idea: the concept's been explored, and with better results. Courtly love and Victorian romantic friendships were hot... obsessive narrators too painstakingly ironic to get it on are not. Furthermore, this "friendly" album actually draws a lot of attention to romance, both by arguing against it and by appropriating its tropes. Let's Be Friends contains so much discussion of fate, dancing, hand-holding, diamond rings, and making babies that the "friends" singing to each other throughout fall somewhere on the scale between a codependent couple and Sesame Street characters who have recently learned about sharing. And if you're not a cat person, forget it. Half-saccharine, half-summer camp, Let's Be Friends initially seems like an innovative invitation, but turns out to be more of an inside joke.

—Alex Green