Alright, what have we got here? Epic fantasy setting. Hell in space, or maybe an open-air dungeon sunk into the inner rim of a volcano. Antagonistic, voyeuristic extraterrestrials en route. Cal-Art-injected pastel hardcore fonts. ASCII Miffy art. Midwestern emo and gang-vocal pile-on pop punk with a conspicuous familiarity with Melt-Banana. Singapore... Yeah, none of this is very Mid-Century Modern, which was a design philosophy popular in the immediate post-war period in the continental United States, which emphasized bold curvatures and defined contours, emphasizing truth in structure and materials, and intrinsically forbearing superfluous embellishments-
That's Not Very Mid-Century Modern Of You is as inverse to these principles as the sun is to the moon's shadow. While earnest in intention, Forests are almost fully defined by their embrace of the extraneous, including text art in the lyrics for every track and utilizing children's mascots, obtuse musical genre litmus tests, ubiquitous trans-Atlantic technological fatigue, and bit-tune techno to elevate sonic texture and textual ballast, and uplift gleaming pop grand jetés to reach a suitable height in order to bathe the atrium between your ears in an acute overflow of stained specular reflection. It's colorful, it's consistent, it's heartfelt, and it's awesome- Forests doesn't bow before a single aesthetic idol; they've built their own atelier, as mysterious and deep as a jungle nestled in the belly of a gorge, one where they hold all the keys, and can unlock a door in the trunk of any tree they choose, bounding up their rings like great concentric staircases, toe-gripping branches in a sprint and hopping off the apex to belly flop onto another buoyant epiphany as it drifts on course toward the canopy- rising above the conceits of critics and dogmatists alike and bridging a gap that feels narrow in retrospect. Midwest corridor, corn country, to the Strait of Malacca- the distance is shorter than you think.
