Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally Review

Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson build him a beautiful room to sing in. The playing is loose and live, the low end is warm, the horns and the strings arrive exactly where a good arranger would put them, and for forty three minutes the record never sounds like anything but money well spent. Critics have been consistent about both halves of that sentence. The praise goes to the sonics and to a singer who has stopped writing about being gossiped about, which is real growth.

The complaint, repeated almost everywhere, is that the songs gesture at feeling rather than describing any, so the lyrics read as mood boards: pretty nouns, weather, a great deal of second person, very little that could only be about one person on one night. That is why the writing grade sits well under the rest of the card. Reviewers who liked it best called it strange and lovely and kept coming back to the sound. Reviewers who liked it least compared it to a fragrance advert, and neither camp is wrong. Put it on and it is lovely. Try to remember a line the next morning and you will struggle.