I’m horribly late to the party on this one, but it took just one look at that cover art to make me want to tell you all about it. Body is Dead is the début full-length album from Boston’s Funeral Advantage, the five-piece created and fronted by Tyler Kershaw. The band make a beguiling blend of jangly indie pop and retro electronics, a swirlingly romantic brand of dream pop with an M83 meets Pains of Being Pure at Heart meets Wild Nothing kind of vibe. Basically, it’s really good.
Funeral Advantage’s songs undoubtedly have the melody to fall into the “pop” bracket, although they’re certainly not shoved down the listener’s throat. Instead the songs are densely woven tapestries of sweet nostalgia, with melody just one of many layers which each get equal space and attention. In a recent feature with the Boston Globe, Kershaw emphasized the fact that his work is not simply an exercise in style, “I guess what I’m trying to process is a mood. It’s emotional music, any way you kind of cut it.” And this emotion is readily apparent, because for all its wistful bliss, the album has a darker core. Lyrically, it confronts a sense of inherent pessimism and self-destruction, or at least self-restriction. As he says in a feature with Substream Magazine, “I wanted to explore the different reasons why someone might subconsciously try to make their life worse on purpose. Personally, I have this constant anticipatory anxiety where I’m expecting bad things to happen and that’s one of the only things I identified with while I was growing up.”
But for those who just want to float away on a haze, these shadowy undertones are easily ignored. Highlights include ‘Sisters’, which has everything you could want in a dream pop song, and ‘Back To Sleep’, with its opening of gentle lilting surf and manic drum work. But it’s ‘Gardensong’ which is perhaps my favourite, which comes bursting to life in a big sunny bloom of an opening which proceeds into a three-minute blast of nostalgic pop.
[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=3026414190 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small track=4259659405]
‘You Sat Alone’ is another stand-out, with its slow, grooving build and reverb-soaked vocals, before the lengthy title track finishes up in a lesson in yearning and reflective pop music, a fitting end to an album like this.
You can get Body is Dead now is a variety of formats. Digital downloads are available via the Funeral Advantage bandcamp page, cassettes via Disposable America and vinyl via The Native Sound. You can also get an import of the beautiful Japanese pressing of the cassette, by label Miles Apart, via the Funeral Advantage bandcamp.
