Merry Christmas. Glacial Love...

“Kind and considerate, not to mention thoughtful and slightly bashful as a person, VanWyngarden . . . singing like a young Mick Jagger and wisely letting the dense and multi-dimensional songs take the forefront, rather than any canned shenanigans or showy, immodest energy. The music on "Congratulations" is a dominance of visions, a rodeo of spirit and essence, a dynamic display of the strange corridors of a young man's mind that's busy contemplating and commiserating with the depths of such an odd muscle and what it's capable of pulling off. "I Found A Whistle" begins with an acoustic strumming that reminds us of an old Neutral Milk Hotel progression, and it's a song that feels like a flooded time capsule or, even more, a time machine that with the bleating of the whistle discovered can transport us into those thousands and thousands of expired years, that let us fall into the arms of dusty and spooky history, along with the yellow tricksters and thieves. There's a man with a pistol, waiting in the moonlight for the word and there are others abusing that whistle and seeing things they maybe shouldn't be seeing. VanWyngarden sings on "It's Working," "You know it's not the same as love/Cause love is only in your mind/Not your heart," and these are the more reasonable, though darkened insights that we mostly get from his lines - ones that come across as the thoughts of an older, albeit burnt soul. We hear of love and disillusionment. We hear of not knowing which end is up and there's a lot of connective tissue holding the chaos together.”