Phillipe Roberts
Between each track on Good Nature, the latest LP from pop-punk trio Turnover, gentle drones overtake their chiming melodies and slide from one song’s key into the next in a cinematic dissolve. It’s a trick they’ve used before, albeit more tentatively, on Peripheral Vision, which found the band rounding out those jagged edges and wading into dreamy, rippling sonics. Now, those details are magnified and expanded; with Alex Getz’s world-weary vocals still far out in front, they serve up slice after slice of deliciously lovelorn, twilight pop. Good Nature finds the band diving even deeper into this newfound affinity for soft crooning and sun-kissed hooks, embracing what could have been a pleasant detour to tug at your heartstrings while their heads swim even further into the clouds.
Far from abandoning pop-punk’s heart-on-sleeve urges, Turnover’s increased focus on atmosphere reinforces them. It’s an approach not dissimilar to kings of soundtrack rock Explosions in the Sky: interlocking guitars shimmer, drums splash and thunder in equal measure. When the band dishes out longer instrumental passages—album closer “Bonnie (Rhythm & Melody)” being the best example—it’s not hard to imagine these searching sounds swirling through Friday Night Lights, and harder still not to wish they’d explore that territory even further. At their best, there’s a sweetly autumnal quality to the music, a sense that something—pride, confusion, or even old musical habits—is drifting away.
But habits die hard, and Alex Getz’s vocals are still firmly rooted in the yearning delivery that characterized their earlier records. And while smoother production succeeds in shifting it towards dreamier pastures, listeners with a knee-jerk aversion to that whining sound might find it hard to ignore.
Thankfully, his lyrical themes have kept pace with the band’s rapid stylistic shifts. Abandoning the scarred, angst-ridden bitterness that occasionally crept into their last album, Getz turns in a more measured, focused set of songs this time around. Peripheral Vision's “I Would Hate You If I Could,” with its tirade against a supposedly “meaningless lover” despite a seething song to the contrary, seems miles away in the rear-view mirror from Good Nature's “All That Ever Was,” with its mantra-like exhortations to “Take what you’ve got / Give it away / It never belonged to you in the first place.”
Indeed, across the album, there’s a sense that Getz is making peace with transience and letting go of a youthfully misguided sense of absolute right and wrong. “What Got In The Way” sees him confronting that directly with an admission that “I don’t know what’s good enough / But I know I need to change my mind,” as a gliding guitar riff pushes him through the current. Considering their harder-edged past, it stands to wonder if the breezier soundscapes are driving this lyrical impulse towards introspection, or vice-versa. But wherever that feedback loop begins, it works beautifully.
“On the last weekend before the fall…” is where we begin Good Nature, and in many ways, that’s where we stay for the entire record. With its crystalline production never showing the slightest cracks—an encore performance for Peripheral Vision producer Will Yip—Turnover preserves those fading summer rays in amber, bundling up in nostalgia while simultaneously leaping forward.