Within the realm of post-punk — nearly fifty years after the genre’s genesis — it can be hard to create something that still holds on to the tradition’s original edge and pertinence. In 2017, the Washington D.C.-based Priests was able to overcome that challenge with “Nothing Feels Natural,” a dark and confrontational debut LP that borrowed respectfully, and effectively, from its genre predecessors.
Unfortunately, the band’s sophomore effort, “The Seduction of Kansas,” seems to do the opposite, with a mishmash of post-punk tropes and a songwriting style that often feels lazy and void of purpose.
That’s not to say that Priests is without its good intentions. The band seems to be making a conscious effort to comment on its specific cultural moment, with references to strip malls, YouTube, cell phones and the Koch brothers all thrown in. The songs, however, seldom move beyond tired topics and postmodern word vomit.
Musically, the band feels similarly uninspired. The group cites Massive Attack, Nine Inch Nails and Portishead as inspirations for this new album; however, those references hardly surface beyond the inclusion of drum machines, dance beats and the occasional synthesizer. With songs like “Youtube Sartre” and the title-track, “The Seduction of Kansas,” the industrial elements and the electronic-sounding production only become obnoxious.
The melody and lyrics on “I’m Clean” also sound especially thin. When the otherwise competent vocalist Katie Greer stretches out a lyric — “I killed myself to make you see your own perversity” — to create a forced rhyme, it calls too much attention to weak songwriting; the same goes for the “na-na-na’s” in the final line of the song’s first verse, which end up sounding like a placeholder that was accidentally left in during the song’s final mix.
Other songs, such as “68 Screen” and “Not Perceived,” stand out with their unique movements and timbres, pushing beyond traditional pop structures. But even in these moments, the music sounds closer to a trial run of an interesting idea than it does to a fully realized and successful concept.
But in other places, the album does contain its good musical and thematic moments. For example, the band bases the lyrics of “Good Time Charlie” around the politician Charlie Wilson, whose extravagant life was turned into a movie starring Tom Hanks in 2007. It’s not necessarily an obscure reference, but it’s a bit unexpected, which creates an intriguing basis for the band’s political satire.
The album reaches its highest point with the song “Carol,” which seems to borrow a page from the transcendent music of Glenn Branca. Greer presents some of her strongest lyrics — “You start to get this rhythm once a century / Is age a barrier to intimacy? / Do you believe in vision, free elections, or feeling?” — on top of the song’s uplifting instrumental, in a manner that feels authentic and affecting. If more of the album was able to capture this feeling, the record as a whole would feel more rewarding.
What’s left instead is a collection of bland and underdeveloped music that feels too much like a grab bag of random post-punk characteristics — along with the obligatory spoken-word interlude near the end. The band has the capability to make a good record, and its members are certainly working from the right reference points, but this record ultimately leaves something to be desired. Undercooked and lacking in edge, “The Seduction of Kansas” ends up feeling dispensable.
