Hooray For Earth – Racy

It’s a bright ‘art-package’....
Hooray For Earth : Racy
8.0 Dovecote
2014 

Hooray For Earth : RacyWhere do you go after delivering on your promise? Boston-by-way-of-New York’s Hooray For Earth, a longtime QRO favorite (QRO interview), delivered on their art-rock promise with 2012 debut full-length True Loves (QRO review), a record that might not have made them the next TV On the Radio, but definitely delivered on what had been hoped. For follow-up Racy, the band gets brighter without losing their skill.

Whenever a band is labeled ‘art-rock’, or ‘art-anything’, that usually means they’re skilled but too artsy for mass consumption. There is some truth to that, if just that any artist in any medium naturally isn’t dead equal in terms of critical & mass acclaim, and anything ‘art-’ leans towards the critical. But that isn’t to say that artists like Hooray For Earth are just for hipsters (okay, they did move to New York…), and that’s even truer on Racy. Brightness pervades the record, one that makes the band’s obvious ability more enjoyable on songs like “Keys”, “Say Enough”, and the title track. This isn’t bubblegum pop, but this also isn’t Philip Glass at his post-modern-est.

If Racy lacks for a ‘breakthrough single’, that’s only because it feels more like a single package, with the band just tilting the angles. But it’s a bright ‘art-package’.

Hooray For Earth – Racy

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