There’s an old tradition in pop music that Passion Pit’s Michael Angelakos has made his personal mantra. For decades, shrewd pop acts have taken the bouncy, hooky stylings of whatever contemporary sound happens to be relevant and paired it with dark, downbeat lyrics for a startling contrast. The brightness of the melodies get scuffed by tales of torment and abuse, and it gives the listener an irresistible glimpse behind pop music’s facade of invincibility.
Passion Pit’s 2012 album “Gossamer” is one of the best contemporary examples of this phenomenon: over chipper, synth-laden soundscapes that wouldn’t feel out of place in an ‘80s-themed Zumba class. Angelakos wrenchingly recounted his grapples with bipolar disorder, thoughts of suicide and subsequent struggles with substance abuse. A Pitchfork feature published shortly before the album’s release laid out most of the gritty particulars in stark black and white. “Gossamer” highlights like the R&B-tinged “Constant Conversations” or the booming “It’s Not My Fault, I’m Happy” thrill with their sonic acrobatics while they devastate by taking us inside of Angelakos’s fractured, exhausted psyche.
Personally, Angelakos has come a long way since “Gossamer.” The woman to whom he’s frequently apologizing on that album has now become his wife (“Whole Life Story,” the third cut off “Kindred” tells of her issues with the publicity of his condition). One doesn’t tame bipolar disorder overnight, but he’s come forward in numerous interviews to say that for the most part, he’s on sturdy ground. His focus has turned from surviving to healing. “Kindred,” Passion Pit’s third album, shows this in spades.
Opener “Lifted Up (1985)” is an unapologetically massive anthem to Angelakos’s wife, with angelic imagery (“1985 was a good year/The sky broke apart and you appeared”) and an electro-gospel choir to match. It sets the tone for the rest of “Kindred,” which is largely about patching old wounds and finding solace in ourselves as often as we find it in other people.
Angelakos hasn’t eliminated the darkness in his music, but it’s no longer his major focus. Over the album’s too-brief 37 minutes, his grayscale constructions get sun-kissed.
One of the most interesting things about “Kindred” is its choice of specific song topics. On “Five Foot Ten (I),” Angelakos discusses his tendency to lie about his height and bends it into a sly metaphor for his inability to reconcile outsized hopes for himself with the reality of his shortcomings. It serves as a counterpoint to album closer “Ten Feet Tall (II),” a strange, almost indecipherable ode to self-acceptance. “Until We Can’t (Let’s Go),” the only track with a scale on par with “Lifted Up,” details Angelakos and his wife’s claustrophobic dissatisfaction with their current home, using that as a jumping-off point to examine our tendency to scapegoat insignificant inconveniences while putting off larger problems.
Perhaps the record’s most fatal weakness is its lack of variety. Angelakos’s frenetic compositions, while individually compelling, can start to grate when stretched across 10 tracks. His affinity for matching complex verses with sugar-rushing, fist-pumping choruses occasionally threatens to blend together — something he avoided gracefully on Passion Pit’s varied debut, “Manners,” as well as on “Gossamer.”
In fact, it’s the rare instances when things slow down that “Kindred” reveals its most impressive depths. “Where the Sky Hangs” is perhaps maybe the most simple song in Passion Pit’s entire repertoire, recalling the smoothness of “Constant Conversations” with little more than finger snaps and a slithering bassline.
“Looks Like Rain” features cymbal crashes and a softly trickling synth to complement some of the album’s most elegant lyricism. Strings sneak into “Dancing on the Grave” to suspend it as a mid-album reflection point, and the result is gorgeous.
“Kindred” doesn’t feel as capital-I important as “Gossamer” did, and that’s OK. It doesn’t need to. It’s about learning that we can rely on other people to give us the skillsets we need to survive, and that’s inherently a less dramatic canvas to work on than the melodrama of an overworked mind.
While the album’s high-frequency sonic features occasionally threaten to sink it, “Kindred” stays afloat as a joyous testament to survival. It doesn’t make its statements with thunderous fanfare. Rather, its revelations trickle in between its booming soundscapes. One might say that it looks like rain.
