Album Review: Self- Super Fake Nice EP
Capitalizing (to some extent) on the renewed interest in the
Self project, thanks to Fat Possum reissuing the band’s debut LP, Subliminal Plastic Motives, back in January, Self mastermind Matt Mahaffey has revived the moniker after 14 years
of relative inactivity, and has #blessed us with the Super Fake Nice EP—a slice of pure pop music perfection that is
both incredibly dense and complex, while still maintaining the coy, self-aware
sense of humor that Mahaffey is known for.
Explaining his absence in a recent interview/profile on
Vice’s music site, Noisey, Mahaffey has spent a lot of time writing music for
cartoons, and I guess he also is the guy who wrote the “Expedia dot com”
jingle.
Knowing that when you go into Super Fake Nice, it’s not hard to hear that focus on accessibility
in these six tracks. They are all incredibly concise, with the longest track
(“Runaway”) clocking in at 3:20; they all boast amazingly crisp and pristine
sounding production values; and, last but certainly not least, nearly each
track is alarmingly catchy—with “Runaway,” “Gonna Rock,” and “Hey, Hipster”
leading the pack as far as creating an “ear worm” goes.
While some tracks are slightly more successful than others,
there is nothing that I would consider to be a bad song on Super Fake Nice—I’d go so far as to say that the EP’s first single,
“Runaway,” is a strong contender to be my Summertime Jam of 2014. Rarely do you
hear a song that is so fun, catchy, and executed so effortlessly—and it’s all
crammed into slightly more than three minutes. I’d say that this whole EP is
a “top down/speakers up” kind of listen,
but then you’d miss out on some of the subtle, yet mind blowing production
details that Mahaffey has poured into it.
As effortless and as fun as Super Fake Nice comes off as at first glance, take a closer listen
with headphones, and you’ll hear just how big of a collection of songs this
really is. The attention to detail is meticulous: including, but not limited to
the compressed, blown-out drums on “Looks and Money,” the striking
multi-tracked vocals on the refrain to “Gonna Rock” (calling to mind the
layering Michael Jackson used to have a penchant for,) and the general
precision in the rhythm to the clever, tongue-in-cheek “Hey, Hipster.”
Having a sense of humor but being able to taken seriously is
a tough balancing act, and over the course of the twenty years since Subliminal Plastic Motives was release,
Mahaffey has only gotten better at it. Super
Fake Nice is both a fun and funny listen; captivating it how clever it can
be both lyrically as well as musically. It’s intelligent pop music that
exponentially more advanced than anything you would hear on a Top 40 station right
now.
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