Somebody Please Show Whitney the Light

Chicago, IL-based Whitney have led a charmed inaugural year. The duo are booked at renowned festivals, playing  Pitchfork, Bonnaroo and the coveted Governor’s Ball in New York City, have received accolades from the entertainment media and are touted as the “Best of What’s to Come.” Their first album, The Light Upon the Lake, didn’t even drop until today.

The self-proclaimed “country-rockers” Max Kakacek (guitar) and Julien Ehrlich (vocals, drums) formerly of the Smith Westerns, offer up 10 songs that are aesthetically displeasing. Ehrlich’s falsetto is grating and off-key. It blurs where one song ends and the next starts. It also makes it near impossible to distinguish the lyrics resulting in the listener feeling emotionally disconnected. Any song on the album highlights this issue.  “No Woman” and “Golden Days” immediately come to mind. There is nothing country rock about this album, in fact, true shoegazers will rejoice.   

The band is solid. Kakacek’s  guitarwork, the keyboard and the horns are what save the album. Yet, Whitney isn’t doing anything that hasn’t been done before. There is no diversity amongst the songs and Ehlrich’s voice is a constant distraction.

The anomaly of making an unremarkable album while receiving critical praise and top billing is nothing new. What is disturbing is that no one is talking about how the duo comes off as entitled and lazy.

According to Whitney’s bio on their label Secretly Canadian’s website, Kakacek says of how they came up with their name, “we were both writing  as this one character, and whenever we were stuck, we’d ask, ‘What would Whitney do in this situation?’ We personified the band name into this person, and that helped a lot. We wrote the record as though one person were playing everything. We purposefully didn’t add a lot of parts and didn’t bother making everything perfect, because the character we had in mind wouldn’t do that.”

They couldn’t be bothered to try their hardest and created a female scapegoat named Whitney to take the fall for it.

Now they want consumers to pay for this album or to see them live when they couldn’t bother to try their hardest?

What about the artists like The Felice Brothers or Courtney Barnett or Margo Price or thousands of unknown smaller acts who work their tails off to create a unique sound and deserve these billings, our attention and listener support?

This is the best of what is yet to come? Surely, music fans we can do better than this and in fact, we should demand it.

The bio went on to say that the duo  “slept in tents in [Jonathan] Rado’s backyard, ate the same breakfast every morning at the same diner in the remote, desolate and completely un-rock n roll San Fernando Valley, whilst they dreamt of Laurel Canyon…”  

Most of America is going to figure out how they are going to put food on their tables. No wonder their unintelligible lyrics don’t resonate.

Perhaps one of the most disappointing attributes about Whitney is their mean-spiritedness as evidenced on “Dave’s Song.” A nasty missive disguised as a love song, it is literally about bullying an acquaintance. “Oh, I know you wish you were my friend” and “I’ve been sick since you’ve left town.” According to an interview with  Paste Magazine earlier this year, the song is about an overweight guy named Dave, who doesn’t know it is about him. Apparently he used to visit the duo’s apartment and is “a crazy-looking dude. He has a ponytail and some weird skin going on on his face.”  

But don’t hold any of that against them, they didn’t do it, “Whitney” did.