Local Natives: Sour Lemon

Local Natives: Sour Lemon

“We’re always somewhere between/ Leaving and arrived,” Taylor Rice croons on “Lemon,” the pseudo-title-track of his band’s latest EP. It’s a classic Local Natives ballad: artfully melodramatic and intricately arranged, with its ultra-specific lyrics zeroing in on the beauty of domesticity (coffee grinding, toweling up wet hair, late-night television blaring). But that lyric also feels self-descriptive: The indie-rock quintet have certainly arrived on a critical level, still riding a wave of goodwill after their breakout debut LP, 2010’s Gorilla Manor. But their sound has continuously shifted with each release, fluctuating between the shiny pop moves of 2016’s Sunlit Youth to the arty experimentation of 2019’s Violet Street. It’s been fascinating to hear Local Natives figure themselves out—to balance their more commercial and unconventional sides. Sour Lemon, a four-track EP recorded in late 2019 with indie production giant Chris Coady (Beach House, TV on the Radio, Grizzly Bear), feels comforting in its relative consistency—stripping away some of Violet Street’s sonic quirks but building on its organic warmth and naked emotion. The marquee track is the cinematic duet “Lemon,” with Sharon Van Etten’s vocal entangled with Rice over fingerpicked acoustics and subdued strings. But every Local Natives album has a unabashed tear-jerker, and this one’s is “Lost,” sung with hair-raising vulnerability by Kelcey Ayer. Over a steady kick drum thump, vintage electric piano and MRI-machine synth pulse, he flutters into falsetto as the tension builds. No one doubts Local Natives have arrived. But here, they sound at home.

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