Eclectic indie pop band Passion Pit released their third album Kindred this past Tuesday, full of vibrating, bubbly synth and sparkling vocals. The album is frontrunner Michael Angelakos most cohesive work to date, deftly weaving sonic euphoria with sounds of nostalgia and inward struggle.
While previous Passion Pit hits, like “Make Light” or “Little Secrets” are deceptively upbeat, often masking cynical undertones, the lyrics of Kindred are more attune with their vibrant sound. This is most likely due to Angelakos’s brazen honesty concerning his own personal struggle with bipolar disorder. Despite the stigma attached to mental health diseases, Angelakos halted his 2012 Gossamer tour in order to seek help for the extreme highs and lows he experiences. “Once I started accepting my mental condition, it stung for a little bit, and then everything improved,” he comments.
Arguably the catchiest tune on the track list is “Lifted Up (1985)” a song bursting with Passion Pit’s characteristic frenzied electronica, dedicated to Angelakos’s wife, Kristina Mucci. Glitchy synth and Angelakos’s giddy voice proclaim, “1985 was a good year/The sky broke apart and you appeared.” Contrary to a typical love song, the speaker acknowledges his intrinsic faults, and subsequent failures: “Oh, but yeah I’m so tired/I fight so hard and come back beaten…Oh but yeah, all my life I stay here waiting.” In “Whole Life Story”, also inspired by Mucci, the listener is given insight into their complicated relationship. Amidst peppy handclaps and sugary synth-sounds, a falsetto voice cries: “I’m sorry darling, how could I have turned this/Into such a, darling, difficult position for you”. Yet this apology is quietly accepted: “And you didn’t make a sound/You were looking out the window at the city/Then you turned and said you loved me.” The most beautiful aspect of Kindred is its persistent optimism despite acknowledged failures. In an interview with TIME, Angelakos speaks in regards to his inspiration: “Growing up. It’s all the things I wish I had been doing instead of dealing with all of the complications from my disorder. It’s also about figuring out my relationships with other people and how to deal with love in a very real way.”
This is evidenced especially in lilting tracks like “Five Foot Ten (I)” and “Until We Can’t (Let’s Go)”, where pounding, out-of-control synth undulates the listener up and down, a visceral parallel for Angelakos’s intense mood shifts. Admirably, the only extraneous track on the album is the autotune experiment gone wrong, “Ten Feet Tall (II)” where Angelakos’s high pitched, overzealous techno-warbling serves more to give the listener a headache than convey any concrete emotion. Taken as whole however, Kindred does well to reflect it’s creator’s liberating ideal: “Being as honest and transparent as you can be…that’s actually really, really empowering. It shows you have guts.”
Angelakos’s attempted honesty makes Kindred as a whole chaotically compelling. It’s messy, but underlying its sonic extremes is an overall message of perseverance.