american pleasure club - a whole fucking lifetime of this '2018

Tracks list

Sam Ray seems relatively happy. He’s married, knows some cute dogs, had a
lovely little Christmas. And the oldest of the prolific Baltimore
musician’s three core projects has changed its name, from Teen Suicide to
American Pleasure Club—maybe not quite a 180 degree turn, but at least a
hard 90. Earlier this month, in a tweet thread that approached Kanye levels of
grandiosity, he congratulated himself and his bandmates, Sean Mercer, Daniel
Windsor, and Nick Hughes, for their first proper album under the new name, A
Whole Fucking Lifetime of This. Ray rejoiced in having finally allowed himself
to make art without the encumbrance of “apathy, fear, [and]
anxiety,” and said that this was only the beginning of a new phase for
him.

Which is not to say his new record is not filled with apathy, fear, or anxiety.
Yet it’s also among his prettiest and least chaotic albums, even as it
jumps wildly from the emotional frankness of post-emo, to the gleeful candy of
hip-hop beats and samples, to quiet folk, and finally to what has long been
Ray’s wheelhouse—his take on the more outré experiments of
’90s and early-aughts indie rock. If you were familiar with Teen
Suicide’s past output, or the music he’s made with Ricky Eat Acid
and Julia Brown, you already know that he’s as casually dismissive of
genre as any SoundCloud rapper, that his albums are collages that would make
T.S. Eliot gape (and not only because Ray’s general fuck-it-all posturing
would unsettle any member of the early-20th-century gentry). Still, coming in at
a cool 35 minutes, A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This is Ray’s most
coherent album. His self-congratulation may be grating, but he’s not
wrong that this might be the best thing he’s made so far.

The record’s sequencing is somewhat inscrutable. The two most obviously
hip-hop influenced songs, “Sycamore” and “Lets Move to the
Desert,” are two of its best. But they’re grouped together in the
middle, when either could have provided a jolt to the album’s less
memorable back half. As it stands, one of the few upbeat songs in the
record’s final quarter is “Just a Mistake,” a misguided slice
of big beat that sounds like Aaron Maine of Porches being drowned alive by the
reunited members of the Prodigy.

Tracklist:
01. american pleasure club - florida (voicemail)
02. american pleasure club - this is heaven & id die for it
03. american pleasure club - all the lonely nights in your life
04. american pleasure club - sycamore
05. american pleasure club - lets move to the desert
06. american pleasure club - there was a time when i needed it
07. american pleasure club - seems like the whole world was lost
08. american pleasure club - new years eve
09. american pleasure club - before my telephone rings
10. american pleasure club - just a mistake
11. american pleasure club - eating cherries
12. american pleasure club - the sun was in my eyes

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