REVIEW: Ducktails - Jersey Devil

Laura Kerry

His latest release in his nine years as Ducktails, Matt Mondanile’s Jersey Devil is both a return to the familiar and a march into uncharted territory.

That contradiction starts with the conditions of the album’s creation. For as long as Mondanile has performed as Ducktails, he has dedicated most of his attention playing guitar for Real Estate, but last year he parted ways with the band to focus exclusively on his solo project. Setting out on a new path, the artist ended up back where he started: his mom’s basement in Ridgewood, New Jersey (he repays her with a warm and fuzzy tribute on “Keeper of the Garden,” singing, “I’ve never loved a woman more than I love my mom ... If you see her give her flowers”). The title of Jersey Devil refers to a folkloric Garden State beast (and X-Files episode) that stalks the coastal woods, a fitting metaphor for a guy who has returned to haunt his old stomping grounds.

In sound, Jersey Devil is also a mix of old and new. Since his first album in 2009, Ducktails’ sunny psych-pop has become increasingly polished, leading up to his tightest and glossiest work, 2015’s St. Catherine. This new album marks a return to the lo-fi, bedroom-pop aesthetic of Mondanile’s earlier music. Using a muted palette of drum machine, retro synths, and guitar, he travels back through time, situating us in a version of the suburbs from Stranger Things or, one could imagine, the way the artist might have experienced them as a kid in the ‘80s. Opening on “Map to the Stars,” a track with a restrained batch of synth sounds to match the celestial title, Ducktails sets the stage for travel into another galaxy in the hull of a cardboard spaceship—a spacey journey with simple tools.

Also different on Jersey Devil is Ducktails’ favoring of digital sounds. In both this project and Real Estate, Mondanile has defined himself by the characteristic sound of his sun-saturated guitar. While his new album includes the occasional jangle, it relies much more on fluid washes of synths. Between this and the often-subdued vocals, some of the album feels hazy and indistinct; it is recognizably Ducktails, but sometimes the ‘70s soft-rock version. Jersey Devil eases in, though, picking up energy towards the middle in songs such as “Lover,” “Mannequin,” and “Shattered Mirror Travel”—all of which feature strong basslines and other sturdier elements to ground them. In these and other places, Ducktails takes the best of his distinct sound and pushes it in a new direction.

As the artist himself might have recently experienced, Jersey Devil feels like coming back to your childhood home to find that your parents have rearranged some rooms. It is uncannily familiar and foreign at the same time. Once you settle in, you might find you like the new layout.

Jersey Devil is out October 6. Pre-order it here.

THE BEST SONGS & MUSIC VIDEOS OF 2015

As a corollary to our Best Albums of 2015 list, we wanted to highlight some individual songs and music videos that caught our attention over the course of the year. Some of our absolute favorites already fell into the album roundup, but in order to avoid too much duplication we decided that any given band could only be present on one list.

What you see below are the singles, standout album tracks, videos (some of which honestly could stand as short films), and other sundries that we felt were deserving of your attention. So pop those headphones on and get to it.

SONGS

Roseau - "Kids and Drunks"

Goth Babe - "Sunshine"

Froyo Ma - "Think @bt"

Budo Kiba - "One For Charlie"

Slow Dakota - "I Saw Christ in Hermès"

Be Quiet - "Ichor"

Bairoa - "Sumersión"

Phèdre - "Tivoli"

Dadras - "Earth Don't Stop Here"

Alabama Shakes - "Future People"

Sebastian Paul - "Riptide"

Gilligan Moss - "It Felt Right"

Totally Mild - "When I'm Tired"

Silicon - "Dope"

Cool Uncle feat. Jessie Ware - "Break Away"

Car Seat Headrest - "Times to Die"

Purity Ring - "Flood On The Floor"

Florence and the Machine - "Various Storms & Saints"

Wild Ones - "Dim the Lights"

VIDEOS

Nosaj Thing - "Cold Stares ft. Chance The Rapper + The O'My's"

Unknown Mortal Orchestra - "Necessary Evil"

Buscabulla - "Métele"

Lower Dens - "To Die in L.A."

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith - "Sundry"

Dralms - "Crushed Pleats"

Dan Deacon - "When I Was Done Dying"

Fur Voice - "Fantasia"

Naytronix - "Back in Time"

The Staves - "Black & White"

Shlohmo - "Buried"

Bagarre - "Claque-le"

Total Makeover - "Self Destructive"

Ducktails - "Surreal Exposure"

FIELD REPORT: Ducktails // Itasca // Ronald Paris

all photos: Brandon Bakus

Laura Kerry

Some concerts succeed because the band puts on a wild, superhuman performance—the group is untouchable, its musicians are larger-than-life. Others work for the opposite reason. The band, usually elevated in our eyes by the fact of having put listened-to music into the world, comes down to earth on stage to show that they are mere mortals with weird haircuts and large, enthusiastic extended families. Ducktails fits squarely in the latter category.  

Ronald Paris

Ducktails, the moniker of Real Estate’s Matt Mondanile and his shifting cast of collaborators, had gained enough of a following by the July 24th release of its fifth album, St. Catherine, to merit a five-ish-month tour throughout the U.S. and Europe. It was apparent at the Bowery Ballroom last Friday that the band has gained a real, enthusiastic following, but what made the show so great was that Mondanile was just as excited to be there as his audience.

Ronald Paris

Itasca

Following the mellow opener Itasca, Kayla Cohen alone on stage playing Nick Drake-style picking patterns on acoustic guitar along with Joni Mitchell-like vocals—a beautiful but internal performance—Ducktails roused an audience that had either been standing in rapt stillness or carrying on conversations.

Itasca

Starting with St. Catherine’s all-instrumental opener, “The Disney Afternoon,” they set the mood for an evening of their signature laid-back, jangly tunes. A traditional lineup of a drummer, guitarist, bassist, and Mondanile switching between synth and guitar, the music invited involuntary and gentle bopping of the head as the musicians gently bopped their own on stage.

Ducktails

That kind of mirroring between audience and band continued throughout. At one point, the bassist—Brooklyn-based Regal Degal’s Josh da Costa—remarked to Mondanile, “For a second I thought I saw you in the crowd watching yourself.”

Ducktails

The frontman, by far the most clean cut member of the band (da Costa, for example, wore a pretty spectacularly long mullet that one concert-goer shouted for him to trim), looked like his audience. That makes sense, considering that he’s from New Jersey and lived in New York for a while. He also marked his home turf calling out by name the dozen or so aunts, uncles, and cousins in the audience. It was endearing.

Ducktails

The feeling of familiarity also manifested in the admission that they had no rigid setlist. A couple times when the band needed to stall between songs, the guitarist played a rousing chorus of “Dreidel, Dreidel.” Aside from that song, the partially improvised lineup mostly included new tracks from St. Catherine, but the ones that got the biggest response from the audience—and the ones that were the tightest—were from older albums: “Ivy Covered House” off of 2013’s Flower Lane and “Killin’ the Vibe” from 2011’s Ducktails III: Arcade Dynamics. In addition to unconscious head-bopping, these earned some inadvertent singing along from several members of the audience.

Ducktails

After all of that bopping, banter, and singing, it was one of those shows where you leave feeling like you just hung out with a bunch of pals—albeit super talented ones. At the start of a tour that has Ducktails looking larger-than-life, the guy behind the hypnotic, sunny indie rock is just a guy. And the show at Bowery Ballroom was all the better for it.

Ducktails

REVIEW: Ducktails - St. Catherine

Laura Kerry

In much of the music that I’m drawn to, there’s an expressiveness that induces something akin to synesthesia. Sometimes, it manifests in a sense of color (true to its album cover, Merriweather Post Pavilion is a greenish blue) or distance (Otis Redding is close; “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” is far). In Ducktails’ new album, St. Catherine, the effect arises in a particular quality of light.

A result of the jangly guitar riffs that define Matt Mondanile’s pop sound both in Ducktails and his other band, Real Estate, the sense of light comes in a pale glow, the kind that cool music videos shot on southern California beaches create with special filters or the magic hour. It’s no surprise that Mondanile, a New Jersey native, realized his seemingly inevitable fate by writing and recording St. Catherine in and around L.A.

Light, though, is more than a feeling on the album. Drawing from a relationship to Catholicism that began in childhood as an altar boy, Mondanile explores love through the lens and metaphor of the Church. The album’s title track, named for the saint of virtue, invokes illumination in lyrics such as, “Disintegrate into the light / And I’ll fall right into you,” and a repeated refrain that begins, “Blinded by the light.” Whether taken religiously or through the lens of religion-as-metaphor, “St. Catherine" (the song) explores the dissolution of self in the face of “light”—a loved one, beauty, or reverie.

The album’s production enacts that disintegration, subordinating Mondanile’s voice to sunny guitars and the other instrumentals throughout the album. His even singing hits our ears as if through a hazy filter, creating a languid and misty quality—the feeling that he is singing from inside the “afternoon interior dream” mentioned on “Headbanging in the Mirror,” or the ecstatic space constructed in “Heaven’s Room.”

As most things produced in a daydream, the result is inviting and buoyant: pop that’s easy to fall into. Over its five-album career, Ducktails has placed itself at varying distances from its counterpart, Real Estate, an extremely likable band whose most frequent criticism is that all the songs sound the same. St. Catherine remains closer—and therefore less experimental—than previous efforts, though it does venture into stranger moments, such as when the guitar jangle transforms into more of a clang on the eerie staccato of “Church.” It also abandons brightness for a less appealing loftiness-turned-heaviness on the perhaps-not-aptly-named third track, “Into the Sky.” And if the falsetto on the narrative song “Laughing Woman” strikes an uncannily sad and poignant note, it could be because Ducktails worked with Rob Schnapf, co-producer of Elliott Smith’s Either/Or, XO, and other heartbreaking works to help add polish to the album.

And polish it they did. Though not Ducktails’ most inventive work, St. Catherine is a crisp and alluring album. The band may not expand its jangly vocabulary, but at least it uses its existing syntax well enough to sweep the listener up in its warm, bright glow. Under the right conditions and with the perfect light, Ducktails inspires the reverie on which it reflects.