It’s easy to get cynical about the current state of indie dance music. The same synthesizer sounds, 808 drum loops and drowned-in-reverb vocals echo through all the trendy music blogs and hipster playlists, music that for years has been derived from the same sources: garage rock, funky dance pop, psych-rock, post-punk, etc. Stagnation is imminent, but not yet pronounced. Still, there’s something so immediately approachable about minimalist dance music culled from the elements of retro pop and touched with the all the introspective whimsy of indie music. This is what alternative pop artists aim to capitalize on most from their mainstream influences: the immediacy and accessibility of contemporary radio hits.
Peaking Lights are new to this game. Though the husband-and-wife duo of Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes have been making music together since 2008, only now on their fourth album Cosmic Logic have they begun to step into the arena of broadly listenable pop. The dreamy psychedelia that they baked into breakout albums 936 and Lucifer has been significantly tightened up and made more superficially attractive without losing its dank ethereal qualities and lo-fi tint. On Cosmic Logic, the band’s glittery electronic aesthetics and hypnotic drum machine rhythms remain, but the songs are stripped of the dense atmospherics and ambling structures of previous efforts. Peaking Lights instead take their cues from ‘80s post-punk artists who appropriated the construction and pacing of pop music and mutated it into something abstract and alien. Miraculously, the music never trudges into the realm of aimless pastiche, and the many clear influences stay uncluttered. Cosmic Logic is an astonishingly focused album given the pedigree, and the fact that Dunis and Coyes somehow succeed in making their dreamy, messy psychedelic electronica so listenable makes it one of the keenest artist reinventions of the year.
The biggest issue with the record is that the duo seem self-conscious with their shift somehow, imbuing the songs with transparently abstract, hallucinatory images as if compensating for the more direct instrumentation. On “Hypnotic Hustle”, Dunis sings, “Chasing rainbows, always on the go / Sun comes up, sun goes down / My mind spins around and around,” offering the same kind of bland imagery and simplistic rhyming typical of the lamest, youth-skewing radio hits. The lyrics in “DreamQuest” are the most superficially illusory on the record, relying on awkward dream symbols to add color to the song: “On a plane of sky / A forest so wild / Animals hide / I am alone.” Lyrics have never been the focal point of Peaking Lights’ music, but without the usual ambient sounds and floods of effects found on earlier records, the vocals become an inescapable centerpiece.
Still, the greatest takeaway from Cosmic Logic should be that Peaking Lights manage to break the barrier of commercialism without losing too many of their quirks. Pop hooks, clean production and sparse composition suit them better than anyone would have expected — ably demonstrated on the plucky neon sounds of “Eyes to Sea” and the infectious rhythms of “Telephone Call” — despite the extra layers of polish eroding what many have come to love about the band. Even the weirdest underground artists sometimes get the urge to create something with the approachable, refined charm of commercial pop music, but not everyone can make it work so well in their favor. That Peaking Lights are so successful with it merely opens up a new avenue for them. Even if they continue to reinvent themselves following Cosmic Logic, which is basically guaranteed, Dunis and Coyes can move forward comfortable with the fact that accessibility is well within their grasp.