Album Review: Take the Kids Off Broadway by Foxygen

Foxygen, the bi-coastal duo of Olympia Washington's Sam France and N.Y.C.'s Jonathan Rado, don't make songs in the traditional sense as much as they mash every possible sonic reference point into schizophrenic micro-albums, cramming so many constantly changing sounds into their compositions, the songs threaten to overwhelm themselves. "Abandon My Toys," the six-minute opus that kicks off the group's first widely available release, Take the Kids Off Broadway, merges raw and wistful interpretations of '60s rock influences like the Kinks and Loaded-era Velvet Underground with some of the kitchen-sink freak folk of early Beck albums. Without ever repeating a chorus or verse, the song somehow keeps a plot that connects with the listener.

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In the old century, the classic-rock canon appealed to a certain kind of music nerd obsessed with order and clarity. In the canon, there was no room for gray areas. The Beatles, Dylan, and the Clash were important because they'd always been important. It was practically a science, with laws that were established on the basis of ancient albums that were similarly well-ordered, with their linear tracklists and agreed-upon contexts.

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At some point in the past four or five years, the line between pop music touched by the '60s and retro-sounding indie folk became so blurred that the two are now effectively one and the same. Think of modern indie bands who have made it kind of big and they're most likely a band that sounds like an amalgamation of yesteryear's mixtapes; fuck a new idea, let's just make a great-sounding record. .

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Alone, Sam France and Jonathan Rado are just a couple of 22-year-olds with dense record collections and cute faces. Together, they’re Foxygen—purveyors of throwback psych-pop. Last year, they converted a New York City bedroom into a makeshift studio and recorded Take the Kids Off Broadway on four-tracks. Then they signed to Jagjaguwar, which describes the duo as “the raw, de-Wes Andersonization of The Rolling Stones, Kinks, Velvets, Bowie, etc.

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