Change Shapes (feat. Jesse)
[ REBOUNDER ]
Each year, through a series of aux jacks, waterproof speakers, and back-porch Sonos setups, commercial music shifts from a facet of taste and individualism to something overwhelmingly communal.
While we reap the benefits at concerts and campfires, the warmer weather means careful curation is swapped out for crude key-jingling to entertain the judgey subconsciouses of the season’s seltzer-addled day drunks, not to mention how quickly June’s surge of new releases devolves into back-alley bloodsport to determine this year’s “song of the summer.”
In this gauntlet, agreeability is the endgame, and familiarity has become the means. Somewhere along the way, fan-service strode confidently out of the movie theater and made itself at home on the Billboard charts. If the Khaled cavalcades of pop stars sardined into tin-can collabs represent the manic energy of the modern franchise crossover, then all the rest are just reboots.
This June has brought us Toto synths, Genesis toms and sun-fueled recycling of George Michael’s “Freedom” by way of ‘Screamadelica.’ But this grating phenomenon of un-subtle odes is nothing new.
Summers prior have featured rehashed Henley, a dubstep edit of the Minneapolis sound, a rap verse redux of a country song old enough to run for Congress, and a blurry cowbell banger ruled by the 9th circuit court of appeals as problematic Marvin Gaye. At this point, Kid Rock’s transparent Alabamian ripoff, “All Summer Long,” once the most detested single imaginable, now seems to represent the entire ecosystem. We started off our last decade scoffing at the boat people, and yet we find ourselves entering this one as yacht-trash.
Luckily, this race has outsider candidates dead-set on shaking up the status quo. Studded, smiling, pleated and pressed in their Friday best, we have mastermind Dylan Chenfeld lending Rebounder his ease, intensity, and unshakable fourth-quarter hustle. His brother Noah, the musical polymath who can think of 37 rhymes for Neighborhood to tie this piece together in meter, is tuning up at his side. And our visiting champion, Jesse Rutherford, with all the menacing sweetness and stoic art-punk pugilism of Lou reed’s ’74 press conference, sits with a pen knife, cleaning the platinum from under his fingernails. They were born to play the roles they’re reading for. TSA agents stop the Chenfeld boys and ask, “So what’s the name of your band?” while passing Amish men see Jesse on the street and whisper, “Who’s the superstar?”
“Change Shapes,” their infectious new track, is entirely at home at the pool party without a trace of the pandering indulgence that once seemed like a prerequisite. But what, really, do I have at my disposal to convey what this beautiful thing is? I can only point you toward the empty space in your Summer it’s about to occupy.
Upon first inspection, this malleable and eluding song somehow slips through your fingers, only to start dancing behind you to its own lopsided groove. Little about it is easily categorized, but what of the instantly familiar ever endures in our mind’s eye? With the dulling of our school-lunch palates, all that readily pleases is either arrantly saccharine or caked in hot snack-dust. The good stuff, on the other hand, asks for a moment. “Change Shapes” coolly anchors the gaze and garners the high complement, “Wait, what am I looking at here?” Consider the look you gave the kitchen radio when you first heard the sweet category-chaos of “Hey Ya,” or the rapturous bazaar tabla of “Get Your Freak On.” You’ve been around long enough to know that things are at their best when you’re at a loss for words.
It’s a charming dispatch from the sunny side of the uncanny valley; organic and mechanical, like digital wind chimes. The lyrics and melody are so deceptively catchy that, even after one listen, the chorus will emerge hours later, as though independently going about its day, reappearing to grab a glass of water or share a fun-fact about the Parthenon. Genre fails where only associative stabs in the dark make headway. Anime Fellini? Skank Tamagotchi? Wii Night-Sports? Regardless, as is stated in verse, if it’s not your cup of tea, that’s cool. But fair warning, some other part of you might be listening. And when that happens, it can become many things.
This Summer’s singles have more of the same wilting references on offer, but this shouldn’t be like every other year. Sometimes the definition of insanity is doing the same thing in pursuit of an identical result. After all, what is the family cabin but a per annum case study on the law of diminishing returns. We have all our lives to work for the weekend and beat the traffic just to sit in silence elsewhere. In this abbreviated burst of newness, when the sun greets long-hidden skin, your smile bares visible teeth, and the world smells sweet and strange again… order what makes you happy, of course. But I have a feeling it won’t be more of the same.