If each person moves through the world at their own speed, then pacificUV’s Clay Jordan and Suny Lyons operate at a decidedly slow tempo. The Athens, Ga., dreampop outfit have released only three studio LPs in eight years — each offering features various droning walls of sound, but the two have managed to imbue every album with their own distinct style.
Weekends, pacificUV’s latest release, is a concept album: A painstaking examination of drug abuse as self-medication to the pain of heartbreak. Rather than tell a story, Weekends is more of a snapshot of an emotional state. With its combination of catchy-yet-understated vocal melodies and guitar lines languishing in delay pedal limbo, Weekends captures the ambivalent mélange of feelings that makes it damn hard to leave the couch after a crushing break-up.
A cursory glance at the lyrical content of Weekends’ tracks suggests an album chock full of simple platitudes, but that’s because there isn’t anything original about a broken heart. Jordan and Lyons explore a visceral merry-go-round of post-relationship anger, regret, sadness, liberation and wistfulness. “If I love you or hate you depends on my mood,” Jordan intones, channeling Stephin Merritt over electropop blips on early track “Funny Girl,” illustrating the rest of Weekends’ slow slide into a pill-popping haze.
Sleeper hit “I’m Here (But It’s Not Me)” finds Lyons telling his lost love, “I’m not going to be where you are… I wanna be free,” while “High” borrows Sigur Rós’ glacial grandiosity, proclaiming, “My love for you will never die.” Neither sentiment is perfectly true, but the sum of Weekends’ emotional highs and (mostly) lows offer a beautifully crafted portrait of a lead-footed march out of heartbreak, allglazed in a woozy shoegaze patina.
Sad-sack vocoder jam “Ballerina” lands smack in the middle of the album and will likely divide listeners into camps of lovers and haters. The drum machine-driven robot boogie of the track isinitially grating, but as the melancholy backing vocals and punch-drunk guitar kick in for the chorus,the track shapeshifts into a masterful study of loneliness. “Turn your sadness into sound,” the robotic vocals burble.
That’s great advice for anyone hoping to haul themselves out of a woebegone slide into self-abuse. It’s also exactly what pacificUV have accomplished.