Return to Love
Reviewed by: Max Miller
“LVL UP!” That prompt, often abbreviated just so, is familiar to anyone who grew up playing RPGs. It was usually a welcome sight — the reward for hours of grinding against randomly encountered foes so your characters could finally have the stats to take on whichever stupidly overpowered boss stood in their way. In Final Fantasy, inarguably the game that defined RPG tropes right up to this very day, your characters had a “class” or “job” (such as black mage or thief) that was chosen at the beginning of the game and could not be changed. In Final Fantasy II, however, the job system was overhauled, and perhaps perfected in Final Fantasy V. Characters could now multiclass, taking levels across various jobs and constructing a unique skillset that transcended the limits of a mere dragoon or blue mage. These characters, before they had amassed dozens of magical abilities, began the game as unassuming folks upon whom greatness was thrust. Their class, at this point, was freelancer.
LVL UP (the NYC-based band) are kind of like the freelancers of indie rock. They formed in 2011 as almost an afterthought, releasing their scrappy debut Space Brothers that October. The album touched a nerve in the Bandcamp-driven rock underground, and LVL UP began to grow popular. It didn’t hurt that guitarists Mike Caridi and Dave Benton’s label Double Double Whammy released seminal records from upstarts like Frankie Cosmos and Quarterbacks, or that the band ran David Blaine’s The Steakhouse (or, more commonly, DBTS), a renowned DIY venue in Brooklyn. Their 2014 sophomore LP, Hoodwink’d, released jointly through Double Double Whammy and the equally beloved Exploding In Sound Records, was a hit in the community they helped found, paving the way for this unassuming band to land a record deal with Sub Pop.
Return to Love, LVL UP’s third LP, has now arrived on the venerable indie label, complete with all the baggage that entails. The band always traded in serviceable basement rock full of simple, hooky guitar lines, emotional lyrics and fuzzy power chords. One can sense they felt the need to push themselves on Return to Love, and so songs like opener “Hidden Driver” and “She Sustains Us” are coated in acoustic guitar and keyboard textures. But under all the polish, this album is not really all that different from Hoodwink’d. This certainly shouldn’t turn off any LVL UP fans, but it makes me question whether Return to Love will turn any new heads.
Sure, there are songs like the short, punchy “Blur,” which is practically swarming in Dinosaur Jr.-esque guitar lines, or “I,” which recalls the barnstormers from their Space Brothers days. But there’s also “Spirit Was,” which is as textbook a LVL UP song as I’ve ever heard, or closer “Naked in the River with the Creator,” which is seven ponderous minutes of slow organ chords that build up to some equally plodding guitar chords. I appreciate the band trying out a few new things, but it’s often too little too late, with “Pain” being an exception that showcases the band making better use of some extended jamminess.
LVL UP have accomplished a hell of a lot in their half-decade as a band. But at the same time, it feels like their musical evolution has progressed rather slowly — like they still haven’t classed out of freelancer. If you’ll indulge me, I’m going to make a completely separate video game analogy about the band. In almost every game in the Legend of Zelda series, our hero Link is first shown sleeping, with some other character often remarking on how lazy he is. He’s the last person you’d expect to be the legendary Hero of Time. LVL UP, against all odds, are positioned to be the indie rock underground’s champion. It just still doesn’t feel like they’ve pulled the Master Sword from the stone yet, and proven themselves worthy of all the praise. Return to Love is another step in the right direction, but it leaves me feeling a bit like Navi, Link’s fairy companion from Ocarina of Time, as she tries to awaken him to meet his fate: “Can Hyrule’s destiny really depend on such a lazy boy?”
Rating: Listenable
