The emotional honesty poured out over a number of anthemic releases has been a proven formula of success for the band, but on their sophomore LP Peripheral Vision, the band treads into deeper water. (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.Virginia Beach’s Turnover has never been a band afraid of telling the truth. “Music is real magic that can change people's days and lives, and the more people listening and loving, the better.” Maybe he wasn’t planning to change lives with this album, but to make art catered to people who are presumably too preoccupied to fully digest it is a pretty careless and patronizing method of operation. “We wanted to keep in mind.music for those of us who are busy with work or our families or whatever problems might be around,” Getz said. They hoped for an album that was simple, but the banality that manifested instead was a pretty inevitable side effect. In their vision for Altogether, Turnover shot themselves in the foot at the get-go. Getz’s trifling depictions of women and inconsequential, clunky ideas-”I don’t mean to make you feel lonely/When I’m feeling like I have no reply”-amount to a record that hardly dips below surface level. “Have you been through the things I have?/Did you lose your trust or feel betrayed?” he argues on “Number on the Gate,” sounding like the dude who complains about his “crazy ex” before ghosting you. On “Ceramic Sky,” he sings of “Waiting to feel the tingling of your lips/Sedative in your touch,” a line too nonsensical to be sexy. He details his reluctance to going out on “Parties,” but once he sees his date’s “body move just the way that it should,” he’s suddenly fine with the shallow social interactions the party entails. This blandness would be excusable if Getz backed it up with compelling lyricism, but his words are typically underdeveloped at their best-at their worst, they induce eye rolls. Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams. But hardly anything could be deemed catchy here, with refrains too monotonous to stick. The band can write hooks At their gigs, Peripheral Vision highlights like “Cutting My Fingers Off” conjure mosh pits and singalongs even amid their relaxed atmosphere, while Good Nature opener “Super Natural” begs to be hummed while completing house chores. “Number On the Gate” could be a pretty good B-side to Good Nature it pops up about midway through the record, as if to offer one last reminder of “oh, yeah, this is a Turnover album,” before the remaining bloodless tracks scrub your memory clean. Take “Still in Motion,” a perfectly adequate album opener if it weren’t introduced with a wildly over-the-top trumpet solo. In Turnover’s attempts to keep things uncomplicated and accessible, they sound anonymous and corny. Getz explained that in the making of this record, the band considered “people who don't have the time to delve into the niches and find fringe artists.” This album, he seems to say, is meant to go down easy, devoid of deeper implications-but Altogether winds up mostly just half-baked. They’ve eviscerated any indication of their “emo-ish punk rock” roots, instead opting for a lackadaisical, stoned regurgitation of ‘80s new wave-like Talk Talk doused in CBD oil. “Chill” has always been an accurate descriptor for Turnover, but Altogether could be used in a D.A.R.E.-style campaign warning the risks of taking it too far.
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