The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com Arts Tuesday, February 19, 2019 — 5 As the saying goes, you can’t always get what you want. It’s hard for something to be great every time. Sometimes, sights are set too high. That is exactly what happened with Buoys, the latest release from Noah Lennox, more widely known as Panda Bear. That is not to say that the album is bad. It’s actually very good, but something is off. In his sixth album, Panda Bear, co-founding member of Animal Collective and frequent solo act, tries something new. Gone are the days of humongous, lush soundscapes and curious lead samples. On Buoys, he only utilizes his highly processed voice, swampy basslines, compressed synthesizers, an acoustic guitar and the occasional sound sample. It’s a strange combination of sounds, but for the most part, it works. The looped guitar licks nestle with bubbling bass while the synth strikes veer anywhere and everywhere with no regard. It sounds disorienting, not in a nauseating way, but a hypnotizing one. Singles “Dolphins” and “Token” are instances where this effect is executed flawlessly. They sound like the listener is swimming through a highly viscous fluid where sounds travel just a little too fast. It’s mesmerizing. In fact, it is almost fascinating to hear. All of Buoys unfolds like this, and it’s great. However, it also leaves listeners wanting more. Lennox is a little too deep in his own zone with this album. It sounds like he found the exact sound he wanted for the album, then refused to explore other soundscapes. Album standout “Inner Monologue” is the only song to break the mold. The song begins with a vocal sample of a woman’s trembling voice, which is soon joined by a droning horn blast and a meandering guitar. Shortly after, Lennox’s voice replaces the horn blasts, and the song erupts into a flurry of sound. It is unlike any other song, both on the album and elsewhere in the industry. “Inner Monologue” serves as an example as to why it is so important to diversify within the album’s set sound. It yields absolutely fantastic results. However, “Inner Monologue” is the exception, not the rule. The other songs on Buoys just do not live up to the standards that previous Panda Bear releases set forth. While albums like Person Pitch and Tomboy both alter and contort their sound in different ways with each subsequent song, Buoys allows its sound to steep to the point of stagnation. It is admirable that Lennox tried this new sound, that much is certain, but he merely evolves his own sound rather than expanding upon it. All in all, Buoys is a wonderful collection of songs. The issue is that the highs are few and far between. Aside from the album’s sound as a whole, no individual song takes a step outside of the realm of the expected. Buoys just does not thrill. It doesn’t disappoint, but there is such little diversity that it is hard to be satisfied upon the album’s completion. Panda Bear has opened the door for an intriguing new sound, but for the most part, Buoys leaves listeners with a craving for something that isn’t there. Panda Bear lulls listeners into a trance with ‘Buoys’ JIM WILSON Daily Arts Writer DOMINO MUSIC REVIEW ‘Buoys’ Panda Bear Domino Recording Company You certainly can’t accuse “Happy Death Day 2U” of wasting its time. No sooner have viewers been dropped back into the world of the surprise 2017 slasher hit than the story picks up with a new day, a new time loop and a new killer in a baby mask. Lest this all start to sound a little too familiar, “Happy Death Day 2U” pulls off one twist by signaling early on that this is no longer a horror movie. Oh, there’s still a knife-wielding psychopath on the loose, but that’s more a pesky annoyance this time around. Instead, with a story centering on the multiverse and time travel and a host of other pseudo-science mumbo jumbo, it embraces the silliness at the core of its premise and plays as an out-and-out sci-fi comedy. I can respect the daringness it would take to genre-hop like that — it’s the sort of move that a lot of series wouldn’t even think of making — even if the movie itself never lives up to that initial shock to the system. Instead it ties itself in knots, layering one sci-fi trope on top of another and drowning an underdeveloped A-plot in a wash of underdeveloped B-plots. The idea at its core isn’t so much “less is more” as it is “no, more is more, stupid,” so it jettisons the simple efficiency of the original film in favor of a surprisingly confusing story that all too rarely gives you something to hold on to in the midst of all the madness. Instead, true to the fast-paced opening scenes, it never stops moving, never stops hitting you over the head with nonsense, because to stop would be to admit there’s no substance and lose your attention. This reaches an infuriating extreme in the third act, which features enough genre-bending for an entire franchise, let alone a single film. By this point, every character arc has either been finished or dropped entirely, so as “Happy Death Day 2U” moves from the sci-fi insanity of the rest of the film to a heist sequence to the twisty finale of the slasher subplot with all the grace of a dying animal, it plays more as padding than anything else. It’s hard to care about any of this to begin with — especially the slasher stuff that the script seems to forget more often than not — but without any character growth to ground itself in, it feels especially extraneous. The one undeniably bright spot is Jessica Rothe (“Forever My Girl”) returning as Tree. What few laughs are to be had mostly come from her righteous fury at having to relive Monday the 18th again after already having done so 11 times, as well as the general hard- edged charm she exudes in every single scene and the few dramatic moments that work do so for the same reason. Rothe’s work is always grounded in something human while the rest of the film all too rarely is. Even in the movie’s worst moments (the aforementioned endless third act) it’s easy to return to her performance and find something enjoyable. If there were ever any doubt that the superstar in the making is the glue holding this nascent franchise together — and if you saw the original, for all its merits, there shouldn’t be — then if nothing else, “Happy Death Day 2U” should serve as its cure. ‘Happy Death Day’ swaps smartness for low sci-fi JEREMIAH VANDERHELM Daily Arts Writer UNIVERSAL PICTURES FILM REVIEW ‘Happy Death Day 2U’ Universal Pictures Ann Arbor IMAX 20+. Goodrich Quality 16 Rolling Stone declared 2018 “a year of nineties obsessions.” We’re one month into 2019, and our cultural fixation on the ’90s — the clothing, the movies, the music — looks as though it’s finding its footing, not losing steam. This phenomenon is strongest among college students, I think; people who were born in the 1990s but have no memory of it. My friends and I take pictures of each other with disposable cameras; we part our hair down the middle and wear giant jackets and it makes us feel cool. The nineties happened just recently enough that we’re able to fetishize those years in a way that feels accurate but isn’t, and this is part of the appeal. It can be anything we want it to be. We’re curating a version of the ‘90s for ourselves to live through, and to do so we punctuate the soundtrack of our days with the music of the era — Run-D.M.C., Melissa Etheridge, Blondie, the B-52s. These are the conditions in which I was first exposed to Sinéad O’Connor. She showed up on my Spotify Weekly playlist in early January, a decidedly non- analog introduction. Suddenly it was 1990 again, the first year of a decade whose complexities I was born too late to remember, whose decadent simplicity is so very appealing. Sinéad O’Connor is an enduring mystery. Her career has taken sharp turns and unexpected detours, her public persona shifting from brave to bizarre and back again. In the ‘90s she became an international icon with her shaved head, dark eyebrows and weird outfits. She built a reputation as a badass Irish pixie, someone who relished voicing unpopular opinions. In 1992, years before abuse in the Catholic church was widely discussed, O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live and told a shocked and silent live audience to “fight the real enemy.” On tour in the United States, she stirred controversy for refusing to sing if the national anthem was played before her concerts. O’Connor has always embraced contradiction. She’s a loud feminist in baggy clothes, an unmarried mother, an angry radical, a sexy pop star. “You know that I can thrill you,” she sings on “I Want Your (Hands on Me).” “I want you, call me to you / I wanna move, will you? I really wanna feel you.” She pivots to police brutality on “Black Boys on Mopeds”: “England’s not the mythical land of Madame George and roses / It’s the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds.” She wants sex; she wants a more just world; she wants love but forgets how to give it. This is the Sinéad of 1990’s “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got,” her second and most well- known album. In the music video for “Nothing Compares 2 U,” she is beautiful and mad in a black turtleneck. Her voice rises sharply and then drops to a whisper: a wounded bird, a wounded woman. “I could put my arms around every boy I see / But they’d only remind me of you,” she sings, the camera zoomed in on her pale, angular face, and you believe every word she says. Then there’s the strange, darker Sinéad, the one who cried and ran offstage at a Bob Dylan tribute concert, who wrote an open letter to Miley Cyrus telling her to dress more conservatively, who said Prince punched her over her cover of “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Similarly unsettling incidents pepper recent news coverage of O’Connor. In 2016, she went missing but was later found safe, riding her bicycle around a suburb of Chicago. She briefly had two face tattoos. She appeared on Dr. Phil for a televised therapy session about her mother. When she converted to Islam in 2018, she legally changed her name to Shuhada’ Davitt. These incidents cast O’Connor as both vulnerable and volatile, an artist whose actions are directed by some unknowable combination of mental illnesses, childhood traumas and a frustrated excess of talent. This is all to say that listening to “I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got” 29 years after its release is an experience that cannot be divorced from the person O’Connor has become in the intervening time. Here lies the persistent difficulty of nostalgia: We know how it all turned out. But does that really matter, when our current infatuation with the ‘90s is so fun? It’s a relief to revisit the cultural artifacts of an era that seems far less dangerous than the current one. “Whatever it may bring / I will live by my own policies / I will sleep with a clear conscience / I will sleep in peace,” O’Connor sings on “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” With that fuck-off attitude, her placid anarchy: I just want to keep listening. Nostalgia, The ’90s, and O’Connor’s enduring legacy MIRIAM FRANCISCO Daily Arts Writer ENSIGN RECORDS MUSIC NOTEBOOK These incidents cast O’Connor as both vulnerable and volatile, an artist whose actions are directed by some unknowable combination of mental illnesses, childhood trauamas, and a frustrated excess of talent.