(2020) The Neighbourhood - Chip Chrome & The Mono-Tones


Review:
From the outside, the Neighbourhood‘s fourth album, 2020’s loosely conceptual Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones, may appear to be their weirdest album to date. However, while there are certainly light, Ziggy Stardust-esque sci-fi elements to the production, the record is one of the Los Angeles outfit’s most accessible, rife with pop hooks and emotive lyricism. Centered on lead singer Jesse Rutherford’s alter ego, the silver-painted Chip Chrome character, the album feels like the improbable love child of David Bowie and Justin Timberlake. In some ways, the record brings to mind Zooropa-era U2 as Rutherford plays the love-lorn spaceman troubadour Chip Chrome, ambling his way through a contemporary pop landscape much in the same way Bono filtered his own rock charisma through characters like the Fly and MacPhisto. Musically, the album is just as inventive, as the band deftly move between cheeky ’70s space-folk anthems like “Middle of Nowhere,” slinky ’80s-style R&B like “BooHoo,’ and shimmering ELO-esque ballads like “Cherry Flavored.” We also get the wonky, space-cowboy folk of “Hell or High Water” and the soft-focus Neil Young psychedelia of “Tobacco Sunburst.” Equally compelling are cuts like the dusky “Silver Lining,” with its Fleetwood Mac-meets-Flaming Lips vibe, and “Devil’s Advocate,” with its wicked, Michael Jackson-meets-Beck groove. There’s also “Pretty Boy,” with its moody ’60s exotica flourishes, in which Rutherford croons of love in a time when leaving Earth seems like an option we might all wish for. He sings, “Even if my heart stops beating/You’re the only thing I need, ooh, with me/Even if the Earth starts shaking/You’re the only thing worth taking, ooh, with me/Even if the sky’s on fire/Got you here, it’s alright, ooh, with me.” Of course, all of this genre-bending, sci-fi fun would simply be pop theatrics were it not for the band’s knack for crafting memorable songs, and Chip Chrome & the Mono-Tones is a journey through the Neighbourhood’s musical cosmos that’s worth taking.





Tracklist:
01. Chip Chrome
02. Pretty Boy
03. Lost in Translation
04. Devil's Advocate
05. Hell or High Water
06. Cherry Flavoured
07. The Mono-Tones
08. BooHoo
09. Silver Lining
10. Tobacco Sunburst
11. Middle of Somewhere


Media Report:
Genre: indie-pop, indie-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits