Where exactly does Worldpeace DMT fit in? Once a solo project, now a duo, and occasionally a motley “band for hire,” they descend from a lineage of groups who reinvented pop, and reinvented themselves in the process: Beatles and Beach Boys; Belle and Sebastian and Animal Collective. Where the 2000s ran with the ’60s’ notion of a “studio band,” Fincham and Please invert the present notion of a “laptop” act—not simulating live music synthetically, but applying the organizational logic of Ableton to reality. Stick Around for Tea is all singsong and slinky strings, stray rattles and petulant shouts: songcraft as sound design, the stuff of enhanced audiobooks. Where it deviates from their debut, which built collagist epics from cultural scraps, is an emphasis on writing—musically and lyrically—that foregrounds the pathos of performance, rather than the bricolage of sampling and splicing. The resulting songs are refreshingly straightforward, and self-aware about it. I imagine Fincham thumbing his nose, during the tinny “School’s Out,” when he sings of just how simple this could be: “Do you play the drums?/Do you like rock’n’roll?/We could start a band/And be the biggest in the world.”
Thank you for your service, Merriweather Post Pavilion: the youth have turned to Matilda the Musical, and are now composing dinky OSTs for their childhood diaries. And Matilda, never stop reading—but you could never be the writer Rowan Please is. She soars on the drumless “Stratocaster,” whose sparse timbre mirrors her bereft characters: girls who own guitars but desire guys, and guitars who—like the girls—need people but hate being played. This is darkly poetic, a tragedy delivered like a nursery rhyme. Yet centrally, it is a delicious contradiction, and the same might be said of Fincham and Please, their competing registers—a winking drawl and a naïve peal—pitting childhood against adulthood, now against then. This is the delightful thing about “On God,” whose titular plea is semantically contemporary but as old as time: “On God, I’ve tried everything.”
