Indie pop duo and life partners Nini Fabi and Ben Gebert take a refreshingly candid look at the long haul on a Laurel Canyon-inspired album.
Scroll Instagram long enough and you'll see a post celebrating Valentine's Day, an anniversary, a boyfriend's birthday -- with the puzzlingly revealing caption "We've had our ups and downs, but..." The new album from indie pop life partner duo HAERTS is like if that caption were an album -- but if the featured relationship were healthy and complex, as opposed to oddly disintegrating in front of 1500 or so uncomfortable virtual spectators. Vocalist Nini Fabi and keyboardist/guitarist Ben Gebert, German expats living in the Hudson Valley, released three LPs as HAERTS, scoring Coachella sets and play in Love, Simon and Carrie.
Where HAERTS' previous outings were synthy and glossy, Laguna Road's folk minimalism is a sharp turn towards Authenticity, a buzzword that's jumped its shark lately (evidenced by pop stars like Addison Rae vocally abandoning it). On Laguna Road, though, the "authentic" bells and whistles -- pared down instrumentation and jettisoning of production, home recording, plainly autobiographical lyrics -- adorn a correspondingly clear-eyed look at the reality of long-term partnership.
Fabi and Gebert have made music together for decades, moved across the world together, and now share a home and a child. They've called this record a tribute to "the sacred mess of growing a life together." What Laguna Road refreshingly, strikingly insists is part of that mess is a whole lot of doubt. "Maybe I lost you a while ago, maybe I'm losing you now," Fabi sings on "You are the Blue." "There's a piece inside of me missing and I never say what's too hard to say." "I told you yes until we die, something old and something new, a promise to be true, but I lied." And strikingly, "Is this all? Is it all?" repeated over and over on "Memento," a song Fabi says is about a day at the beach with their daughter.
If you missed Fabi and Gebert's recent joint interviews, you'd be sure Laguna Road is a breakup album. Instead, it's an honorable excavation of a relationship in process. Where the rom-com ends with the happy couple finding each other and cuts to black, HAERTS is committed to documenting what happens after the credits roll: the work, and doubt, and deep wells of fear, shame, disappointment. The pushing away, the begging to stay. It's an ode to the never-ending work of sharing a life -- and deciding, every morning, whether to cut and run. "This ain't the end of everything, this ain't the end of me ... I'm not your enemy," sings Fabi on "Enemy," a song so steely in its insistence that it feels delivered straight from a woman blocking her lover's exit out the front door of their shared home.
It's not an easy decision: on "Woman on the Line," which feels like Adele singing aloud a pamphlet on postpartum depression, Fabi writes "you smile and say you want to build a life with me, but there's no life in me." She confesses on that song she has nothing left to give, on "The Lie" that she's broken her early promises, on "You are the Blue" that she thinks her partner could find someone better and pushed him towards doing so. HAERTS is more honest with listeners than most partnered people are with themselves.
And then, they stay. Laguna Road feels like a high-wire feat of emotional resilience in that way, depicting an audit and embrace of the things too dangerous to say, and then continuing on with the work of life together. It's something like a mindfulness meditation: the scary thoughts come flying towards the windshield, and then pass by; you look over the cliff and decide not to jump today.
Fabi's vocals keep such heavy stuff from getting maudlin: they're buttery, oaky, even as they're raspy. It sounds like her voice is coming through over an old radio, like if Jessica Pratt sang with Lana Del Rey's cadence. Gebert's "minimalist" instrumentation clearly descends from the duo's Laurel Canyon-immersed California days. It's so pared down that when the first gasp of percussion comes in on "Memento" it's a thrill.