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| Pitchfork |
 Papercuts' Jason Quever rarely raises his voice. The Bay Area native's one-man project began as a folkier relative to friends and tourmates Grizzly Bear and Beach House, bands also making smeary, drifting pop music informed by psychedelic harmonies of the 1960s. But unlike Beach House's Victoria Legrand's vocal smoke or the high-wire melodicism of both Grizzly Bear's Ed Droste and Daniel Rossen, Quever breathes more than he sings, as though he isn't sure whether he wants you to hear him at all. So when he abandoned more earthen tones for the reverb-marinated dream pop textures of 2009's You Can Have What You Want, we lost a huge part of him. By muddling his mixes and softening his vocals even further, he also made it difficult to know how to position our ears. Toward those long-gone vocals already headed out the door? Or at the impossibly curvy melody that was bouncing on our doorstep? Fading Parade, his Sub Pop debut, finds both coming together in one place. It's his strongest outing to date.We can actually hear the difference right away. Though opener "Do You Really Wanna Know" chains together a marvelous set of guitar melodies, it doesn't really make its move until Quever slaps his chorus square in the cheek, forcing the whole to thing to jump to life in a way that’s much more immediate than his previous sets of songs. He does the exact same thing with equally impressive force in single "Do What You Will", a doe-eyed, auto-harped beauty with a whale of a hook. A small fraction of this record sounds to be free of reverb and delay, major portions of songs submerged for varying amounts of time. That's a lot of Spector-ized, effects-driven atmosphere But it's also an interesting manner of balancing things, as those moments when Quever has a layer of melody come up for air and back into focus-- particularly by way of his vocals-- are what really distinguish this album from earlier Papercuts records. This isn't music that breezes over you anymore. In a way, Papercuts' addition to the Sub Pop roster makes perfect sense. While that label will forever be linked with the wet, teeth-gnashing sounds of early grunge, it also experienced a renaissance in the decade just past by releasing extraordinarily gentle records, career-launching debuts from bands like the Shins and Iron & Wine. (Sub Pop snatched up former/fellow freak-folker and Gnomonsong label co-founder Andy Cabic's Vetiver project not long ago as well.) Quever's songwriting and presentation have been and can be similarly non-threatening to a fault. While a song like "White Are the Waves" and the rest of this record's too-vanilla middle third still express "nostalgia" or "haze" or the sort of semi-familiar ache that we as listeners associate with more amorphous and inscrutable songcraft, it's not easily revisited nor is it really capable of sticking....full text |
| Dustedmagazine |
| Something has gone very wrong with Jason Quever’s Papercuts over the last couple of albums. The tension in pop hallmark Can’t Go Back was between dreamy dissolution and insistent, guitar-driven forward motion. You could feel actual longing, actual striving in cuts like “Dear Employee,” and “John Brown,” a pulse of life even in their most cloud-gazing intervals. It was a great pop album, hinting at even bigger success to come. But with the follow-up, You Can Have What You Want Quever de-emphasized jangle and strum in favor of oozing atmospheres of sustained keyboard tones. It was easy to get lost in thick miasmas of sound, to lose the thread of the narrative and melody. Fading Parade brings back the guitars, but continues the slide toward formlessness, with songs that are always pleasant but no longer very compelling. Quever is reaching for Spector’s all-enveloping wall of sound, but forgetting how grounded that sound was in classic rock ‘n’ roll rhythms. It was Spector, after all, who encased that archetypical “boom … ba-boom chick” beat into “Be My Baby;” there was a spine in even his most aura-fogged compositions. Not so with Quever’s rainbow-colored ephemera, songs that have the staying power of soap bubbles, and hardly any connective tissue between one measure and the next. “I’ll See You Later, I Guess,” is about as anemic and effete as its title suggests, the merest trace of bass, the slightest hint of tambourine-jangle pushing the song to its conclusion. “Chills” is all whispers and insinuations, the words bleeding outward in edgeless, indefinite melodies, the drums buried low in the mix. There are some strings in “Chills” and later in “White are the Waves,” but no, they are not the kind of edgy, sawing strings that chop and unsettle. They are more smooth-ness in an album that is pretty close to unruffled. What waves? There’s hardly even a ripple here. Not coincidentally, Quever’s most successful efforts bring up the drums. “Do What You Will,” the single, is the album’s tensest, most absorbing song. Here a steady beat bounds and encases wistful melodies, providing the framework that makes sudden flights — the soaring “Do what you will” chorus — all the more acrobatically compelling....full text |
| Avclub |
| It can be difficult to keep subtlety interesting. On Fading Parade, Papercuts (a.k.a. Jason Robert Quever) hasn’t changed too much, sticking with the fuzzed, hazy, ’60s dream-pop that’s the musical equivalent of a shoebox filled with old Polaroids. The problem is, in the five years or so that this washed-out sound has seen a resurgence, other bands have done a lot more with it: It’s hard to listen to the mellow-yet-intense complexity of Beach House and go back to Papercuts’ level of tranquility. Still, Quever has cultivated a sophisticated collection here, driven by simple riffs, sleepy melodies, and soft vocals. The album is also lyrically thoughtful, touching on romance, youth, pain, and angst in articulate, mature ways. His instrumental mastery is impressive (employing, among other things, Moogs, autoharp, Mellotron, piano, and Echoplex), and his songcraft shines on tracks such as “The Messenger,” which slowly shifts into a striking progression of lurching, atmospheric acoustics. Even so, Fading Parade is mostly devoid of drama. That’s likely by design, and it doesn’t completely deprive the record of enjoyable parts—it just makes the album a less exciting listen than its peers....full text |
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