Album Review: Darwin Deez - Songs For Imaginative People

Darwin Smith and his Deez inexplicably built a rabid cult following over 2010's debut self-titled album, especially with the tweeer-than-thou Radar Detector. It wasn't all rainbows and sunshine – Smith's lyrics often hide darker navel-gazing than the sugar-rush melodies may suggest – but the band's aesthetic, erring on the side of self-knowing hipster-writ-large, was always going to be a tough sell a second time around.

Songs For Imaginative People is already an ambitious project from the name onward. Yet it also underlines the problem – that Smith perceives his music to only work for people who can “expand their minds”. It's evident throughout the ten tracks that there's a lot going on – some of the compositions are incredibly busy, with echoes of kaleidoscopic tricksters Menomena in the dynamics of songs like You Can't Be My Girl. Yet the issue is that the band fails to control this melange of sounds, with many tracks offering a stuttering rhythm and mess of tone that makes it hard to embrace. The effort becomes Everest-like when you take on board Smith's vocals and lyrics. Most of his existential, inner-turmoil lyrics are barbed with deliberately quirky couplets that feel contrived and forced – the Our Father aping in (800) Human, the grating Free (The Editorial Me) – “Life is a greenhouse gas/Half the police in masks/Pretending to be my friend…” Ugh.

Darwin Deez do get some things right – the idea of struggling against loving someone you hate with You Can't Be My Girl, the more plaintive pop of Redshift – but Songs For Imaginative People works so hard to be the geek outsider that it becomes unlikeable, no matter how much Smith squirms and whines.