Haim - Something To Tell You (2017) [Official Digital Download 24-bit/96kHz]

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Haim - Something To Tell You (2017) [Official Digital Download 24-bit/96kHz]

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Haim - Something To Tell You (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time - 42:39 minutes | 948 MB
Studio Master, Official Digital Download | Artwork: Front cover

In January, Este Haim offered a slightly prickly explanation for the four-year gap between her band’s debut album, Days Are Gone, and its follow-up. The delay had been caused, she noted, not just by the extensive promotion of its predecessor, or Haim’s apparent perfectionism in the studio, but because: “We write and produce everything ourselves. We don’t have producers sending songs by email”. This statement is revealing about the musical circles Haim now move in. On arrival, they seemed like the most successful manifestation of rock’s current obsession with the pillowy sounds that emerged from LA’s studios in the 70s and early 80s – most specifically Fleetwood Mac, an influence that has cropped up everywhere in recent years, but seldom as piquantly as on Days Are Gone’s title track. But Haim were swiftly co-opted by the world of mainstream pop, which seems less interested in their place within a lineage of classic Californian rock than their way with a honeyed melody. They wound up supporting Rihanna and Taylor Swift and forming part of the latter’s extended “squad”; collaborating with Calvin Harris, Major Lazer and Bastille. It is a world where writing and producing your own material (more or less) might well feel remarkable; where Something to Tell You’s supporting cast (producer/co-songwriters Ariel Rechtshaid and Vampire Weekend keyboardist and Frank Ocean and Solange collaborator Rostam Batmanglij; Madonna and Justin Bieber producer Bloodpop; and songwriters Dev Hynes and George Lewis Jr) counts as getting by with a skeleton staff.

Certainly, Something to Tell You feels like an album aimed at an audience less interested in musical progression than killer choruses. Whatever else they may have been doing over the last four years, Haim haven’t spent much time radically overhauling their sound. Declining to fix what ain’t broke, it offers up the same polished synthesis of soft rock with a faint whisper of 90s R&B. The R&B influence is still more discussed than apparent, but it is definitely audible in the rhythm track of Ready for You. The album relies on the occasional burst of what Rechtshaid calls “production bullshit” to disrupt the familiarity: the deep, dubby echo that gradually envelops You Never Knew; the moment when the breezy Nothing’s Wrong dissolves into a patchwork of sampled breaths, warped vocals and synthesised pulse; the grinding, slowed-down bass guitar – like something you’d hear on the intro of an early 80s Cure track – that provides the backing of closer Night So Long.