Indie-pop band Tennis’s enduringly twee and lovelorn songs play as bleary homages to the sounds from the 1960s to the ’80s, drawing a connection between nostalgia and the naïveté of young love on albums like 2012’s Young & Old. On their sixth studio effort, Pollen, husband-and-wife duo Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley take one step closer to the present by interspersing their 20th-century callbacks with nods to turn-of-the-millennium pop-rock.
Album opener “Forbidden Doors,” which features Moore at her most forceful vocally, immerses the listener in Tennis’s signature blissed-out yacht rock before “Glorietta” moves in a new direction with startlingly acerbic acoustic-rock. Between the vintage Y2k backing track and lyrics about chemtrails and patriotism, the song evokes the starry-eyed jingoism of post-9/11 America and points to a relatively recent example of the pitfalls of nostalgic idealism.
“Let’s Make a Mistake Tonight” continues this adventurous streak with a thrumming dance beat, all with the retro-futurist veneer of recent albums like the Weekend’s Dawn FM. Pollen’s subdued middle stretch, however, feels more familiar as it weaves a love story about two hotel service workers: “I worked the kitchen when I carried your plate/You didn’t know that I was serving you fate,” Moore sings on “Hotel Valet.” This breezy yarn posits a more plausible meet-cute than Moore and Riley’s actual backstory, which is that they met as philosophy students before writing their first album while living on a sailboat.
The common thread connecting the album’s real and imagined romantic scenarios across its 10 tracks is escapism, whether it be the isolation of the open sea or the insular behind-the-scenes goings on of a hotel. Pollen’s closing track, “Pillow for a Cloud,” ostensibly reveals the psychology behind Tennis’s insular sentimentalism: “Living on sighs/Taking our time/Before it takes us over,” Moore sings, her voice swaddled in dreamy guitars. But where this introspective turn should shatter the illusion, the song instead reaffirms the urgency of Tennis’s romanticism, elevating it to the level of personal and historical preservation.
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