Thoughts on Foxwarren's 2
There are a few hints that suggest that Foxwarren’s new album, 2, will be markedly different than what precedes it in both the Foxwarren and Andy Shauf discographies even prior to the listener pressing play.
The first is the group’s new press photo (pictured above): a shot of Shauf and other members Darryl Kissick, Dallas Bryson, Avery Kissick, and Colin Nealis lounging on a couch set against the artificial background of a canola field with two horses in the middleground. The background’s ersatz quality is most notable if you trace Shauf’s outline, where the lines around his head and shoulders are so severe against the blue sky and cloud that one gets the feeling that he could’ve been sloppily cut out by a grade-schooler learning to collage. There’s a gorgeous sense of hyper-reality to the photo—a hyper-reality that contrasts nicely with earlier, more straightforwardly pastoral band photos from their last album cycle—that comes to suit the new music’s playfulness once you dig into the record. Is this another “folk rock” record like their 2018 self-titled LP? How much of 2’s elements are played live versus being sampled, looped, and triggered?
Another hint comes if you scour 2’s credits: it’s the work of famed mixer Neal H. Pogue. Pogue’s presence on a record like this might be mostly meaningless, except to record nerds like myself, so I’ll excerpt some of his most notable credits prior to working with Foxwarren here. If we skim the “Discography” section of Pogue’s Wikipedia page, we can see repeated credits for imperial phase Outkast, as well as the names of TLC, Goodie Mob, Janelle Monae, N.E.R.D., Nelly Furtado, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Tyler, the Creator, among many others. And then, smack dab at the end of that list—right after Tyler’s newest record, Chromakopia—is Foxwarren’s 2.
This is all to emphasize how much of a departure 2 is from Shauf’s prior work, and certainly from the earlier Foxwarren material. Whereas Foxwarren’s 2018 “debut”1 largely scanned as well-crafted, 70s-indebted indie rock with occasional artier flourishes in the Wilco/Radiohead vein, 2 explodes—and then dramatically rebuilds—what Foxwarren can be from the ground up. Shauf detailed, in another great interview with Kreative Kontrol’s Vish Khanna (his fifth on the program!), that the new album was eventually created remotely across provinces, and was heavily inspired by GZA’s Liquids Swords, and his own purchase of a sampler. Members would upload different song ideas to a shared drive, and Shauf would pull bits out, (re)sample them, and then try to sing melodies atop these now-different, quasi-song elements.
I have to admit that when I first heard Shauf share that on Kreative Kontrol, I felt a small bit of trepidation. “Group of Thirtysomething White Indie Rock Dudes From the Canadian Prairies Get Heavily Influenced by East Coast Hip Hop for New Album” as an imagined headline doesn’t exactly instill a tonne of confidence. But, thankfully, the influence is entirely sonic, and is what is responsible for how thrilling 2 repeatedly sounds. There is so much variety and sonic detail on this album that one of the most fitting comparisons I think I can make for this project now is to beloved work by The Avalanches, which is, to say the least, not a Foxwarren comparison that I ever had on my bingo card.
The album’s main sonic ingredients are, generally speaking: Shauf’s plaintive vocals; Avery Kissick’s banging beats that are almost certainly punched up by Pogue in the mix so that it’s not outside of the realm of possibility that you would want to play this in a car with the windows down on an upcoming scorching summer night this year; frequent employment of ‘40s style string parts—maybe sampled or played by multi-instrumentalist Nealis?—; brief snippets of movie dialogue from an undisclosed source (or set of sources); and lovely guitar parts played by Bryson and Shauf. Shauf, for his part, seems extremely relaxed on this material, able to let his hair down, and indulge in a more impressionistic, music-forward writing mode as opposed to the laboured-over narrative songwriting that has become his calling card on beloved albums like 2016’s breakout, The Party, and 2020’s The Neon Skyline. Shaufheads may remember, however, that prior to settling on 2023’s Norm, the artist said that he had been working on a(n eventually scrapped) “disco” album. Around the Norm press cycle, the idea of the aloof, mannered Shauf making a disco record indebted to ABBA made some folks do a double take, but 2’s dancier moments certainly give one a window into what this could’ve been like. Take, for example, one of the record’s high watermarks, the lovely “Wings.”
On this track—which could plausibly fit on a Peter Bjorn and John or Jens Lekman album lol—Nealis anchors the proceedings with a funky bassline while a string sample(?) that sounds like it’s falling in and out of time churns away in the background behind Shauf’s elegant vocal lead and a lovely little piano line that is eventually harmonized on guitar. Another one of my favourite tracks on the album is the mind-bending, “Strange.”
“Strange” is another bass-forward track where a vaguely “eastern” sounding string sample(?) is triggered against a sumptuous palette of jazzy, skittish drums, another truly incredible bassline, and Shauf’s darting lead vocal singing, “Will my need for you grow stronger still / Or will the feeling fade, against my will?”
Both of these tracks made my eyes pop out of my head on first listen, because they seemed to come from a place of such pure, joyful musicality that sounds truly perfect on these spring days. This is a far cry, one might say, from their (entirely fine!) 2018 album that was described as “like the feeling of the pull of sleep.” Instead, 2 is fully technicolour music that is hyper alert to the world’s limitless details, and all of the possibilities that both songs and lives can take at any given moment.
That said, Shaufheads that might feel mystified by the album’s unexpected beat-tape style ethos can still find tracks on 2 that work in the songwriter’s more “classic” writerly mode. The gentle “Yvonne” is easily the track that one could picture slotting most seamlessly into a narrative Shauf project, and many folks enjoyed being treated to acoustic live performances of the song over the past couple years. “Dress” is another track on the album that apparently features lyrics that Andy repurposed from one of his own songs. If one yearns for the Foxwarren of old, the rockier pre-release singles “Listen2me” and “Deadhead” will be appealing, as these are the tracks on 2 that sound most like they could be played by the five-piece in an actual room. Along those lines, it will be interesting to see how the group marries material across both of its records as it embarks on a proper tour this fall. Undoubtedly, there will be those in attendance that have only shown up because they heard “Sunset Canyon” on an Indie Chill Vibes playlist, and then there will be the freaks like me that want to hear them jam a 15-minue version of “Strange” that devolves into a bunch of movie samples or something.
So, let me be clear: I totally enjoy the earlier Foxwarren material, but I also love 2 a whole lot right now. It’s an album that, through sheer boldness of vision, indicates that Foxwarren and Andy Shauf are not artists prone to resting on their laurels. They could’ve easily remade the 2018 record, but they chose not to do so, instead deciding to push the boundaries of what Foxwarren can be musically. I can’t wait to see where else this sense of musical maximalism and openness can take them.
Foxwarren’s 2018 self-titled album was intentionally positioned as their “debut” by both the band and their respective record labels, ANTI- and Arts & Crafts. Technically, however, their real debut was 2011’s self-released Has Been Defeated, in itself a very impressive project, but one that the band has seemingly disowned by attempting to wipe it from the internet. It is an extremely nostalgic project for me, however, and I love how it bears sonic traces of Foxwarren’s lineage in the prairie punk and emo scenes, though that might also be why they’re eager to distance themselves from it at this point. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is a great deep dive!