Review: Ducktails “St. Catherine”

11 Aug 2015 — Zachary Taube

Ducktails – the solo project of Real Estate's Matt Mondanile – has played a very important role in my life for reasons that I'm still unable to really put my finger on. Perhaps it's because Mondanile's earliest music never took itself too seriously; Ducktails' first few albums were filled with nothing more than the joy of experiment – lo-fi bedroom pop made by and for the 21st century suburban daydream. Mondanile wrote songs about pizza, the mall, about everyone's favorite importer/exporter, about the vibe and how not to kill it. When I first got on the Ducktails train some six years ago, I fell for Mondanile's effortless, even coy ability to produce no-pressure songs for no-pressure times – songs to get stoned, borrow your mom's honda and drive around the suburbs to. 

Since signing with Domino in 2011, Mondanile has left his hazy bedroom pop behind for a cleaner sound, more complex song structure, and, on his latest LP St. Catherine, a lyrical honesty that's been unseen in any of his catalogue up to date. St. Catherine is, in his own words, “mostly a breakup record. It’s a story, the beginning of the record is moving to the west coast and experiencing that, and then falling in love and then falling out of love, and then going back into it and then eventually it dissolves at the end.” It is in this effort to tell a story through an entire album that we find Mondanile pushing Ducktails into a completely new direction – one driven more by honesty and emotional exposure than by effortless, tongue-in-cheek pop experiment.

As far as production goes, St. Catherine is impeccably clean. Songs like "Surreal Exposure" are formally straightforward, combining baroque countermelodies with the Ducktails' classic phaser-ed guitar tone. "Heavens Room" – perhaps the most impressive song on St. Catherine – pairs a silky bass line with Romantic string orchestration and a chorus hook distantly sung by Julia Holter (the song is slowed down and revisioned on the last track of the album, "Reprise", which ends the record with a melancholic and nostalgic shudder). Mondanile's voice is equally present and his lyrics precise – he approaches feelings of frustration ("Headbanging in the Mirror"), amorous captivation ("Heavens Room") and jealousy ("Medieval") with unabashed emotional transparency – and he's no longer afraid to hide his voice behind a multiplicity of effects.

Yet it is the very concept of St. Catherine that sets the album apart from any other Ducktails release. The motif of religiosity is abundant; song titles like "Heavens Room", "Church" and "St. Catherine", as well as the cover art – a photo of religious sculptures in a seemingly Italian Renaissance church (pardon my inability to distinguish classic works of art from a distance) – point to a certain holiness, and assert that the entire album should be taken as a work or "high(er)" art. St. Catherine is certainly sentimental, and even a bit melodramatic at times, yet it is precisely this fearless sentimentality that makes it Ducktails' most riveting album to date.

St. Catherine is out now on Domino.