Possible Humans: Everybody Split

Summers bring remembrance of a time filled with idleness and freedom. The days are long and ideally filled with little else but sheer enjoyment. Summers are for spending time with friends outside with the smell of fire pits or barbecue or something similar. Unfortunately, for some of us, this ideal summer feeling is only a memory now. Work and responsibility never seems to disappear the way it once did. Listening to Everybody Split feels like summertime again.

Possible Humans’ debut album brings you back to an easier time. An easy listen, the album is full of soft, laid back tracks. Like summer, the album feels as though it is blissfully going nowhere. It is merely enjoying the journey along the way. Despite the mellow mood of the album, tracks like “Aspiring to be a Bloke” or “Airspace Quality” have a dreamy quality about them. Like the nostalgia that you might feel for a time when summer could mean happily wasting time, there’s a distance to the songs that drives attention to them. The tracks are more thoughtful than simple languor, though there is nothing wrong with that part of it either.

Everybody Split sets the tone at once with the opening track “Lung of the City.” The soft leading guitars are followed by light drumming and catchy choruses. The songs feel breezy and carefree. The light touch gives the songs agility. Tracks like “The Thumps” feel especially quick as the beat drives through diverse guitar sounds. Though none of the tracks are short, it usually doesn’t feel like they are never ending.There is a subtlety behind the light riffs throughout the tracks that keep them from becoming uninteresting or trite. Hiding behind the lightness though is an infrequent, heavier riff coming through at times. Some of the tracks like “Absent Swimmer” take this edge more than other songs. Despite the occasional heavy, serious sound throughout the album, there is never a loss of the easy-going playfulness that characterizes all of the tracks.

The sound and mood of Possible Humans’ Everybody Split could be easily compared to something from Tame Impala. Both bands hailing from Australia, they share a tendency to jam and look for the mellow vibes of a groovy song. Though Tame Impala is better known, it would be a disservice to Possible Humans’ work on Everybody Split to think of them only as second fiddle.The album is at its worst when it leans too hard into being a psychedelic, jam band. “Born Stoned” takes the good parts of the album and carries them to their logical extreme and makes something worse for it. Turning the psychedelic undertones of the album all the way up only takes away from the good parts of the album. This album may just be a testament to the idea that sometimes a little goes a long way.

Though it has been a long wait for a proper album from Possible Humans, Everybody Split has made the wait worth it. It invites you to get lost in the smooth groove of its tracks. Together the quick, light riffs and beats with the distant vocals give the album a striking delivery. It feels like it could be the soundtrack to something real and tangible though it never loses its dreamy quality. The tension of holding these two opposites makes Everybody Split an album that makes me want to come back to it for the next listen.

Rating: 8.9/10

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