Foil Deer

With Foil Deer, Speedy Ortiz fully owns its style, quirks and neuroses on a level that would have been unimaginable circa 2013's Major Arcana. [No. 120, p.61]

Her wordplay ducks and weaves among the braided guitar melodies and idiosyncratic rhythm section with a razor-sharp cutting edge, with varying levels of daintiness, allowing the dangerously catchy melodies and thicker-bodied hooks to amass into a fantastically fluid LP.

It’s lyrically dark and has the musical aggression to back it up.

Massachusetts outfit Speedy Ortiz's sophomore album is a biting, brooding affair: a Nineties feminist soundscape stippled with dissonance often verging on sinister, and wielding brainy guitar lines and lyrics.

This album makes you work, forces you to hit repeat not to relive sweet, instantly gratifying thrills, but to let it root into your brain to understand it better.

The band’s strengths are all the same, but they’ve been developed, and their focus seems to have stabilized and sharpened.

Dupuis and Speedy Ortiz walk along intersections effortlessly: now and then, power and fragility, intricate poetry and direct prose, pain and pleasure. Foil Deer does this as well as their excellent debut, but also takes some risks in its growth.

While Foil Deer will not likely be a commercial breakthrough, it is instead the work, and the success, of a band with different goals than increasing their festival poster font.

They lurch between plaid-smothered unresolved chords and frontwoman Sadie Dupuis's verbose story-telling, delivered deadpan a la early Liz Phair. [May 2015, p.95]

With its genre manipulation and intensely poetic, socially aware lyrics, Foil Deer is a stronger, more assertive record with more to say for itself.

Song for song, this is some of Speedy Ortiz's best work yet.

Foil Deer doesn’t quite sustain that edginess all the way through, like when the meandering guitars and wandering wordplay fade on the slower moments of “Zig” and the out-of-steam closer “Dvrk Wvrld”. But there’s enough on Foil Deer to show that Sadie Dupuis and Speedy Ortiz can be the captain and the boss of this generation of indies.

Foil Deer is catchy, exhilarating and smart. [May 2015, p.81]

Foil Deer is a meticulous collection which deconstructs convention. [May 2015, p.100]

As the band continues to evolve around and with her, Speedy Ortiz’s music finally sounds as complex as its leader dares to be.

By its end, Foil Deer asserts itself as a collection of some of the band’s best songs and some departures of varying quality.

Winging away from Major Arcana‘s dark, tense pockets--the jagged, crackling riffs and the jarring way Dupuis’ voice faltered at the end of her desperately insightful verses, as if she were about to fall off a cliff--stretches Speedy Ortiz thin at times on Foil Deer.

The echoes among unhinged riffs on “Good Neck,” “Raising the Skate” and “My Dead Girl” speak to the unity of Speedy Ortiz’s vision, as well as its limitations; the spikiness that gives the music its appeal also turns it abrasive over the long haul.

There was a sense that this record would be Speedy Ortiz's great leap forward. Instead, we get some tentative baby steps in the right direction, as the band settle for just really good instead of truly great.

Foil Deer is an upswing from the listless cynicism that clouded their 2013 breakout, Major Arcana: This time, Dupuis and fellow guitarist Devin McKnight take charge.

Foil Deer isn’t an easy listen but it is a compelling one.

While it’s a nice retro bagatelle, a regrettable lack of originality really hampers Foil Deer.