HAIM – I quit
On their fourth album I quit, HAIM are all about reclaiming their space and striking out on their own
I quit codifies HAIM’s freedom; after dispensing with insoluble problems, they present confluent ideas of leaving. These recurring sentiments are cohesive, if a bit laboured – healing is a somewhat staid topic in contemporary music – but I quit is at its best when it bends the road to recovery with humour and attitude.
Opener Gone announces HAIM’s terms of exit ('I’ll fuck off whenever I please'). With a sample from George Michael's Freedom and an assertive vocal that melds the quiet hiss of INXS’s Need You Tonight and Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side (a continuous north star in all their sound design), they are hellbent on growth. All over me is an enthusiastic agreement to a good old rendezvous, but Relationships is the album’s sensual highlight and holistic career-best. It proves itself with smart melodies, a sticky pre-chorus – 'lie, lie, lie' and 'why, why, why' satisfyingly rip like velcro – and masticating percussion, as it tries to make peace with the cumulative mistakes of a steamy love affair.
Then with Liz Phair flair, Down to be wrong is a downbeat, mellow shuffle that expands into a cathartic belt (note its incisive ruminations on a compromised self, like 'Boy I crushed my whole heart trying to fit my soul into your arms'). Take me back is a covetous hand reaching into the past. Its indie-folk rap verses amuse with unsparing but nostalgic refrains about past lovers: 'Bad GPA, couldn’t get it up' / 'Had a bald spot, now it’s a parking lot'. There's a Joni-worthy bridge, as well as traces of Imogen Heap to be found in the twinkly call and response chorus.
The album’s anatomy proves weaker around the middle. Inert entries like Love you right and The farm stall the momentum gained thus far, while Lucky Stars and Million Years cause confusion with some misguided sonic deviation – the former with an all-consuming post-punk sound and the latter with a disorienting breakbeat. Everybody’s trying to figure me out is a stirring, grungy trudge, but ultimately lands as an uninspired meditation on malaise that, unfortunately, would’ve fit comfortably on the Garden State soundtrack, though moments of revelation do peek through. 'I built a jacked-up time machine to prove I was right' is a fun poetic turn, while the outro eddies of 'you think you’re gonna die but you’re not gonna die' ground you with some solace.
Doing a lot with a little, Try to feel my pain relocates the good. There’s an almost furtive mischief to its beat, and Danielle’s simple, fragmented melisma of the word “try” translates so much feeling, it unlocks knockout sincerity that really delivers on the album’s push-and-pull tension. Spinning swaps Alana onto lead vocals for a slinky, Prince-like disco dalliance. A sense of misgiving is buried by her more immediate giddy sensations (moving little savoir faire: “why am I acting so strange?”). Deftly, its final chorus concentrates on my favourite HAIM-ism: impassioned, breathy ad libs.
Cry starts with plaintive shades of Bon Iver and builds to a hymnal bridge that shares halting, church-reverent DNA with Rhianna's FourFiveSeconds. Blood on the street is a return to the languid cool that defined Women in Music Part III. The informal, varying choruses delight with sprechgesang from righteous divas. Building on the deliciously contemptuous 'I can count on one hand all the times you made me feel free', its heady, strung-out guitar downstrokes evoke keying the truck of a waster who wronged you in the car park of a Midwestern dive bar. Appropriately, in the defiant new wave closer Now it’s time, the album reaches its wisest conclusion yet: 'You'll never give the perfect ending / Not that anybody could', before bursting into a liberatory coda that basks in finality. Our unreliable narrator has reckoned with herself.
On I quit, HAIM are unbound. It is brilliant, then wandering, then brilliant again; an imperfect, burning, compelling work.
Listen to: Take Me Back, Try to feel my pain, Blood on the street