Pitchfork

Dan Bryk's hyper-specific songs are as funny as they are poignant, approaching romantic strife with sarcasm and apathy. On the sparkling settling-for-less anthem "We Don't Care", Bryk can't even get worked up enough about his cheating lover to deploy his secret-weapon falsetto. He gets cleverly bilious with jabs like "you can trust me as far as I can thrust in you," but the titular refrain reminds us that it's not a big deal-- he's just saying. The careering garage-pop of "BecaRebecca" has an equally skewed relationship to the typical love song: A woman Bryk becomes infatuated with on an airplane is "rubenesque" and "statuesque" with "blue eyes framed by cat's eye glasses." But she also has "the faintest trace of a pencil thin mustache," a knock-off Gucci purse, and people call her "Chewbecca", although Bryk "would never do that." It's funny that singers who cynically exploit idealized notions of plastic beauty and weighty fate scan as earnest and sensitive, while cynical Bryk's representations of the actual world, where physically flawed, terminally bored people half-heartedly find and lose each other all the time, contain so much more truth and empathy.