Always nice when an album’s title pretty much sums up all your feelings on it, isn’t it?
Kaleo’s intentions appear to be catching up with them. For a while, they’ve been the bold ones (if you want to call it that) to ask the question ‘what if indie-rock designed almost exclusively for commercial flogging was, to any extent, good?’ Shockingly enough, they’ve been pretty good at maintaining it. The blindingly obvious purpose of Way Down We Go (and, lesser but still relevant, its sibling Break My Baby) doesn’t mean they can’t have some quality. When your contenders are the graceless clatter of Imagine Dragons and the barely-existent fare of X Ambassadors and their ilk, some indie / folk / blues-rock with a bit of tone and presence is a godsend to the right ears.
But that’s the thing about making music worth caring about—it’s open to far greater scrutiny. Sure, Imagine Dragons take a merciless beating whenever they lumber back into view, but no one’s picking them apart to find greater merit or a problematic root when it’s plainly terrible on its face, are they? Kaleo, on the other hand, actually have the chance of graduating from their entry-level marketing and soundtracking class into the big, wide world of being a real band. Thus, there are some standards to hold them to, and Mixed Emotions can be a difficult album to love under them.
That’s because Kaleo’s primary directive is still making sure they fit in their trendy little boxes. It always has been, to where pervasive allegations of frontman JJ Julius Son being merely ‘Hozier at home’ are yet to shift. And credit to Kaleo—it’s something they wear well. That’s still true on Mixed Emotions, an album that can feel pretty rich and rugged when it wants to, and a far cry from corporatised over-sanitation. But there’s a niggling feeling across its meandering run that this is the apex of Kaleo’s uncertainty. This isn’t the statement of new life from a band free from the gristmill’s conveyor belt; more often, it almost feels like an act.
That’s not meant to be some damning accusation, because it’s so obvious. You get it from how indie-moulded and Americanised Kaleo are actively forcing themselves to be, a practice that they’ve always indulged in. On Mixed Emotions, though, it’s almost too obvious. USA Today wears lines like “Here we are, fighting for America” as front-facing declarations of solidarity, subtextually woven into Lonely Cowboy and Memoirs through iconography of the untamed western plains. It’s lovely that that’s where Kaleo’s creative arrow has pointed, but chances are there’s not a great deal of relatability for this Icelandic band outside of broad archetypes with a better chance of going down easy. They do actually have a song sung in Icelandic on here, Sofðu Unga Ástin Min, but not only is it stuck to the end like an afterthought, Julius Son’s lack of enunciation doubles to mask anything too explicitly ‘foreign’ about it.
Speaking of which, Julius Son is another newly on-the-fence element in Kaleo’s repertoire. It can’t be denied that the deep, low burr he’s picked as his default is magnetic, but does it also not seem a bit…too predictable? Again, it’s a case of where the crank of the gears lodging Kaleo into place can be louder than the band themselves. A prime example is Rock N Roller, where despite the heavy affectation and Julius Son’s abundance of “woo!”s and “yeehaw!”s, his stone-faced demeanour can still be heard through them. He doesn’t radiate the excitement of this rockstar fantasy, as much as talks the talk in an attempt to feign genuineness. You just have to put it next to a song like Hey Gringo from Kaleo’s last album, which lived and died on its need to be believably cocksure and macho, but also had a bit of its own kick that wasn’t so wholesale replicated. The rockier songs on Mixed Emotions are more cut-and-dry, as they opine rock’s gold standard as an extrapolation (or maybe exaggeration?) on Black Keys-esque blues- and garage-rock that typified indie trendiness, but has since fallen off spectacularly.
It almost seems a little off, then, to say that Mixed Emotions isn’t really that bad of an album. For the abundance of critiques, they’re almost entirely contextual, harsher in intonation thanks to Kaleo’s more elevated status. There are still strictly bad cuts, to be sure—whoever came up with Run No More and the idea to have it hollowly meander through its cul-de-sac for the best part of six minutes needs their creative privileges slashed—but you won’t feel wronged in any significant way. The essence is essentially the same, often to where if you aren’t looking for stumbles, you probably won’t find them. Mindset really is a key factor; if the only musical exposure you get is through ads, then Mixed Emotions might very well be the most transcendent thing you’ve ever heard.
Otherwise…look, Kaleo are really keeping the mask on, but they aren’t grifting from behind it. If they were, they wouldn’t have shelled out for Eddie Spear on production, known for work with Zach Bryan and Sierra Ferrell, and the deft, winsome alt-country touches he brings to Legacy and Memoirs are really good. Perhaps it’d benefit from not having such a clear divide between the rock songs and the more folk-leaning ones—the back half of the album droops a bit for it—but when it works on a track-by-track basis, that’s still not nothing. It’s good that USA Today looks to prod and graze the mainstream blues-rock edge with its guitar squalls and sawing bass, if only to simulate real rawness. Back Door might get even closer, where there’s almost a believability that Julius Son is going for it with his screams and hollers that actually feel on the correct side of preordained looseness.
At the end of the day, it’s less of a hassle to just give Kaleo the benefit of the doubt. They’re not revolutionising rock music, nor will they ever, so letting Mixed Emotions off is just the most charitable thing to do. And at the end of the day, them playing pretend as cowboys isn’t as detrimental as other bands under similarly (read: worse) phony pretenses. There’s still the feel that they could be better, though. There’s a barrier that’s difficult to ignore, and Kaleo would even just acknowledge it—let alone interact with it—maybe something even better could come from it. But when have bands from their side of the rock music neighbourhood ever shown an interest in going out of their way for something? If Kaleo’s output for the rest of time is just variations on Mixed Emotions, that’d be fine; if it were the product of them trying it little harder, it might actually be great.
For fans of: Hozier, The Black Keys, Barns Courtney
‘Mixed Emotions’ by Kaleo is released on 9th May on Atlantic Records.
Words by Luke Nuttall
