Review: She & Him - Classics

She & Him, the effervescent and unlikely musical collaboration between “adorkable” Manic Pixie Dream Girl macro (and, it should be noted, fiery, no-effs-given feminist) Zooey Deschanel and dour, Portland-groomed singer-songwriter M. Ward, is almost offensively inoffensive, a perversely positive hipster take on cookie-cutter, AM Gold-worshipping indie-pop (at least the ukulele is kept to a bare minimum here). Their latest full-length,
Classics, a 13-song collection of blissfully insubstantive, safe-as-milk granny-pop standards, is unfortunately no exception (“the moment when She & Him went full Starbucks,” as per Alison Lang of
Exclaim!). Mining the past for inspiration can’t save She & Him from themselves.
One feels slightly guilty slagging off She & Him for being, well, so friggin’ nice, like kicking a puppy for being too goddamn puppy-like. Even so, the oozing, cloying sentiment and affectated melancholy of archly telegraphed, yet painfully earnest takes on “Unchained Melody” and “We’ll Meet Again” (is that a threat, or a promise?) more than warrant punitive, critical sanction with extreme prejudice. Perhaps more so than ever, She & Him are relentlessly and painfully fluffy, enough to make The Carpenters seem like proto-DSBM by comparison (hey, the inherent darkness beneath the white flight-era facade of Karen and Richard’s iconic suburban pop sound always had a slight hint of corpse paint covering the deceptively serrated edges, as far as I’m concerned).
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