Dopamine by BØRNS (3/5)

Must Hear Tracks: “10,000 Emerald Pools” “Electric Love” “Past Lives”

I’m not sure whether Marc Bolan would be proud or not, but Garrett Borns (known onstage as BØRNS) certainly did his part to keep glam rock alive in 2015. Borns looks the part, too. With long, wavy brown hair and a thin figure, he admits people often mistake him for a woman. His singing voice only reinforces the trend. Most of his melodies are far to high for an average male to sing with any success. Therein lies his appeal. His soaring vocals sound equally related to high-pitched 70’s glam rockers, The Sweet, and present day pop queens, Lorde and Lana Del Rey. At his best, Borns combines the sugar-coated melodic urgency of glam rock with the more conversational and mellow tone of Lorde in the same songs. The problem with Dopamine is that it doesn’t manage that winning combination very well. The highlights fly as high as any other airtight pop song, but the rest (the majority) are duds.

Despite the duds, the entire album lives up to the title to some extent. Dopamine feels like a 40 minute sugar high, near constant sonic joy. This album is clearly not meant to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Even on the more melancholy tracks (“The Emotion” and “Clouds”), the sounds all jive together. On Dopamine, dissonance is not in BØRNS’ dictionary. On top of that, the songs are written and paced for maximum enjoyment. Borns makes listeners wait for the best parts, but not for very long. The verses are usually groovy, and choruses come predictably and often. These songs throw very few curveballs. Instead, it’s straightforward and well-executed pop music. The result is an entirely listenable record, but not an entirely repayable one.

“10,000 Emerald Pools” opens the album with gorgeous, reverb drenched harmonies and maintains that initial sense of weightlessness throughout. The balance between old school glam rock and modern pop is perfect on this song, and the vocals fit the backing music about as perfectly as humanly possible. This is what the upper echelon of rock-inspired pop music can provide in 2015: a roller coaster of  perfectly matched sounds, a consistently satisfying thrill ride that rises to dizzying heights and burns out quickly, leaving the listener wishing it would last longer.

Dopamine reaches that level only one other time, and this second peak comes early in the album as well. “Electric Love” is track three and is clearly BØRNS’ most popular song. It’s less subtle than “10,000 Emerald Pools,” opting for a blistering, triumphant tone over a more subdued and organized one. That tone is precisely why it has caught on the way it has. Raw emotion in the form of scream-singing seems to be in vogue right now. How else would Adele’s hopelessly boring “Hello” make it on the radio if not for the raw emotion in the chorus? But I digress, the reverb heavy harmonies are back with a vengeance on “Electric Love.” Of all the songs on Dopamine, this one is most closely related to 70’s glam rock. Dopamine is so grounded in present day pop music, though, that the heavier glam rock influence doesn’t make “Electric Love” sound like a nostalgia trip. Rather, it strikes a balance between old and new that has made it particularly popular, for now.

Although “10,000 Emerald Pools” and “Electric Love” caught on like wildfire, I think “Past Lives” deserves some credit. The first minute of this song is hands-down the most gorgeous passage on the album, with Garrett Borns showing off his effortless falsetto that simultaneously brings to mind Thom Yorke and Brian Wilson. Unfortunately, the rest of the song is too pop heavy, mostly abandoning the glam rock influence that gave BØRNS’ more successful tracks the spark they needed to sound fresh in a very crowded pool of artists all jockeying for attention.

That point brings me to the biggest issue with Dopamine: aside from the three tracks already mentioned, it sounds like white noise. It’s nothing new, nothing particularly interesting. Several songs (“Dug My Heart,” “American Money,” “The Emotion,” and “Overnight Sensation”) sound like a young boy (albeit a talented one) doing Lorde and Lana Del Rey covers. Almost as egregious as copping Lorde and Lana’s style is that the chorus of the title track, “Dopamine,” sounds so much like Manners-era Passion Pit that I wonder if litigation is an option for Michael Angelakos. These are supposed to be “original songs.” With four songs out of eleven sounding eerily similar to the same two other artists and the title track sounding more like Passion Pit than BØRNS, the question arises: why listen to BØRNS at all?

The answer is in his hits. Currently, BØRNS has one full-length album (Dopamine, obviously) and one EP (Candy) on the market. The most impressive tracks on that full-length were taken directly from the EP. It seems as if Garrett Borns created some truly infectious music when he first moved to Los Angeles (“10,000 Emerald Pools” was the first song he wrote in LA). After the initial success of the Candy EP, Borns simply couldn’t keep up with his rising popularity and the demand for a full length album, so he pieced an album together quickly amidst a demanding touring schedule. The result sounds like the circumstances in which it was created: Dopamine is beautiful but grossly underdeveloped. All the songs on Dopamine and the Candy EP were written after Garrett Borns moved to Los Angeles. He states in interviews that the environment impacted his writing for the better, but it also seems like that combination of  excitement and inspiration produced songs with little thought behind them. If Garrett Borns settles into his new environment a little more and strives to develop a more varied sonic and emotional palette, his next release could very well be the realization of the potential Dopamine hints at. If not, at least we got a few sugar-coated morsels out of it this time around.