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.

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.