Gossamer

Passion Pit’s second album came out in the US on July 24, 2012, on Columbia, three years after Manners. Passion Pit was a band on stage, but on record it was Michael Angelakos. He wrote and sang the songs on Gossamer and played or programmed nearly everything, leaving the drums and percussion to his co-producer, Chris Zane, and the orchestral parts to guests. Days before the release, on July 16, he cancelled the rest of the band’s July dates to seek treatment for bipolar disorder, and two days later Pitchfork ran a cover story in which he described his illness at length. The album arrived with that story attached.

He worked on it at Gigantic Studios in Manhattan with Zane, who had produced Manners, and the engineer Alex Aldi. When Pitchfork visited, Angelakos had been working there for six months and had filled the room with synths, drum kits and pedals. Someone had told him to try a song with 24 tracks, he said, and he ended up with 157. Nico Muhly arranged strings for four songs, played by a section that included Rob Moose and Nadia Sirota. The Swedish a cappella group Erato, whom Angelakos found through their viral cover of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend”, recorded their parts in three days, including the 33-second interlude “Two Veils to Hide My Face”. He told Interview he named the record after seeing a spider at home.

He also told Pitchfork he’d had “a really rough year”, that he got engaged right before recording, and that all the truth was in the lyrics. To Interview he described the album as a relationship under strain while he was going through hell, and as being about his then-fiancée, Kristy Mucci. “Take a Walk”, the first single, is the exception. Its verses are sung in the voices of men from his own family, from Greek immigrant breadwinners to a present-day relative who has to tell his wife he stole money, and he said all of it happened except the theatrical ending. He later told Time Out he hated the song and hadn’t wanted it on the album.

The rest turns inward. “I’ll Be Alright” opens with hyperspeed glitches and ends with nearly two minutes of Muhly’s strings. “Constant Conversations”, a slow R&B song that Rick Rubin heard as a demo and told him had to go on the record, follows a drinker cornered by a tired partner. “Carried Away” puts an apology over the album’s brightest chorus, and “On My Way” proposes marriage. The closer, “Where We Belong”, draws on a suicide attempt.

Gossamer entered the Billboard 200 at No. 4 with 37,000 copies, a career best, nearly three-quarters of them downloads. Metacritic averaged 76. Pitchfork gave it 8.4 and called it “an overwhelming album about being overwhelmed”, though it thought “Take a Walk” was misplaced as the opener. The A.V. Club found it more elegant than Manners, with Angelakos singing lower and more clearly, and Drowned in Sound heard a more human record. The doubters went after the surface: PopMatters found it grating as often as catchy, NME wished it would come down from its high now and then, and Clash found the songs too alike.

The doubters were describing the method, not missing it. Angelakos told Time Out that some of the best girl-pop songs of the 1960s were terribly depressing and easy to sing along to, and that he wanted the prettiness to count as much as the pain. On Gossamer the brightest hooks carry the worst news, and on “Constant Conversations”, “Carried Away” and “On My Way” that trade works exactly as intended. The cost is real too. Stacking songs that deep leaves the second half hard to tell apart, and “Take a Walk” sits oddly in front of everything else. It is still the record where the lyrics finally came forward in the mix and said what they meant. Angelakos promised Time Out that the next one would be warmer, about settling down, and Kindred followed in 2015.