The title of Alien Tango's Kinda Happy, Kinda Sad makes it seem like the album is on the fence as to its intent and impact. This is misdirection. It's kind of the crust you might find around a diamond. All you have to do to get around this deflection is crack it open to be rewarded with the treasures it contains. The album was made with a very clear sense as to its own emotional aspirations and the breadth of its aesthetic bounty. You really don't even have to look past the first track "uwu" to glean this, either. It's enthusiastic about its very existence, almost to the point of being a little embarrassed by the flood of passion it contains, emotions which manifest as bubbling globular synths that pop and spatter the track in pink-florescent tones while a rounded, effervescent vocal cadence churns the melody-like cake batter- if anything "uwu" is an understatement, "OwO" is closer to the tone of unstrained excitement for music making that the track exhibits. While the superabundance of electronic vocal layers and stylistic turns on this initial offering may seem like it's setting you up for some super-sugar-saturated hyper-pop, the following track levels things off a bit and sets the stage for the remainder of the album. Retaining the electro-kineticism of its predecessor, "Lemme Go" nonetheless shifts priorities to a more traditional form of indie melodicism with a distinctly baroque approach to psychedelic artisanship and an abstract scrutiny of the god-forsaken and granted nature of love and longing. The entire album has a, "What if Holger Czukay got his hands on some early Ariel Pink home recordings" kind of feel- country lines are simply yard markers in a race towards an accelerated pop-cantata denouement with the dynamical fury of a Bob Eggleton landscape set ablaze. Alien Tango is really pushing his vocals and cultivated psychedelic pop sensibilities to the point where they sound like they're the final transmissions of a the horny crew of crashing UFO. You can absolutely sense the orgone aura radiating off of the euphorically deviant and divergent carousel "Song for FIFA" and the interstellar interlude "Hubble," while tracks like "Día Gris" and "1000 Years" demonstrate a purposefully more terrestrial balance while remaining knee-deep in a surrealist stream of observations, with a rugged lo-fi strum setting a gritted pace by which to juxtapose the laid-back lilt of the vocal's drifting monochromatic tide in the former, while swiggly visions of Beatles-esque utopias taking shape within the sonic geography of the latter. Kinda Happy, Kinda Sad is about as wary of its own inspiration and internal sense of direction as the planets are phobic of their own orbit, as in, neither could achieve forward momentum without their respective embrace of their respective motivations and cosmic compulsions. In short, the album has its own sense of gratuitous, confounding gravity, a whirr of force that will drag you to its bosom while making you feel like you've been catapulted to the skyline with a bungee cord jerry-rigged around your ankles.
