A black-and-white photo of two teenagers locked in a sprawling, open-mouth embrace is featured on the cover of The Thrills album Teenager. The single still captures them permanently fused together in fully clothed pretzel contortion as plush toys watch on in a fixed, dead-eyed stare. "Who are they?" You might ask. Are they in the throws of love or is she resuscitating him from the shock of entering what appears to be a 3-by-4-foot recreation of Peewees Playhouse? The lack of any narrative payoff is fitting, since like the album itself, the music contained within Teenagers contains little to no actual conclusive revelations of teenagedom.
The nostalgic content of the album can be summed up as a bevy of mind-numbing adolescent platitudes mimed by men in their mid-to-late twenties. This might have not been so noticeable had the album not been written by grown men in their mid-to-late twenties, called “Teenager” and described in their press kit as “an interior narrative exploring… the emotional world of [vocalist Conor] Deasy,” with lyrics that near the prosaic depth of a Livejournal, like:
“But now I know I’ll never be someone else. Well, not for a long time. I came all this way just to say my feelings have grown. No longer a good friend. I long to hold you in my arms.”
I would like to interpret this as self-awareness, which might ironically point toward Deasy’s emotional stagnation since high school, but the absolutely humourless tone says otherwise. Maybe there simply are no conclusions to be drawn from Deasy’s emotional spelunking. Maybe even after High School it’s still about High School.
But if you can look past the lyrical and conceptual banality of the album you’ll be greeted by surprisingly mature pop instrumentation that effortlessly interprets the lush sound construction of Phil Spector and the perfected harmonising of The Beach Boys, a silver lining on a trite cliché of teenagedom.
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