Review
Foxygen
...And Starpower

Since the first time I heard the dewy-eyed lyric, “I caught you sipping milkshakes in the parlor of the hotel,” I’ve been somewhat smitten with the psychedelic princes behind Foxygen’s screwball absurdum: moody-broody Jonathan Rado and Kevin Barnes incarnate, Sam France. Following the release of their hugely successful breakout album, 21st Century Ambassadors, it seems Rado and France decidedly opened the floodgates, motioning in a stream of consciousness so epic that it leaves the average listener completely staggered. After a series of strung-out show cancellations and performance antics comes …And Star Power.

The tunes on this album don’t have quite the same groove as 2012’s Make It Known, which is what I imagine would be a schizoid redux of The Nightmare Before Christmas sing-alongs or the head-bobbing hum of “Shuggie.” In fact …And Star Power is a whole different animal or rather, a whole different behemoth (yes, it is 24 tracks in total). The album, which features the likes of The Flaming Lips, Bleached, and White Fences, moves with no particular ebb-and-flow, meandering through the piano-sodden alleyways of “Flowers” into what might be a supercut of Battlestar Galactica space combats. The four-part Star Power series is a psychotropic fever dream, but "How Can You Really” and “Coulda Been My Love” are the outliers of this collection, staying true to the more refined, mid-fi drowsiness of preceding albums. A personal favorite is “Everybody Needs Love,” an all-encompassing piece full of lobbing guitar lines and a sweet, pleading inertia that is completely and quintessentially Foxygen. …And Star Power requires a second gander, a hefty task given its length, but after a few listens, the kaleidoscopic chaos that doesn’t register immediately turns into something sublime, something totally unique to the self-proclaimed 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic.