A Classic Education: "Forever Boy"

There’s a bit of something anthological about A Classic Education’s sparkling new single “Forever Boy”: a tingling sense of instant familiarity which isn’t tethered to a single neural point but instead floods the subconscious with a handful of unrelated memories. To call it plagiarizing would be wrong; obvious influences abound, sure, but they’re combined and digested in ways that don’t lend themselves to any bands specifically. “Forever Boy” is a Frankenstein-like collection of verses, choruses, and bridges which functions as this quintet’s polite, latte-sipping, Shelley-esque monster. (Is that chillwave?) Let’s move on.

Opening with a shade-dwelling melody reminiscent of summer days when it’s too hot to do anything except tug on the sweaty t-shirt clinging to your chest, the Bologna, Italy-based group slowly layers sun-baked guitars alongside Jonathan Clancy’s sleepy vocal delivery amidst the soft rumble of a puttering floor tom. “Boy” heeds too much of Real Estate’s sloth-rock approach, or at least seems to until the chorus hits with a bit of that jangly indie-pop Surfer Blood perfected with Astrocoast (2010), the surge of energy arriving unexpectedly but dexterously enough to not make the change jarring. Sing-songy and beer-swilling as the chorus is, subtly embedded into it is a violin that carries the chorus to a breakdown which scatters the song’s structure like a collapsed Jenga tower, casting something approximating Beirut’s marching band drum work into the lull before languid guitars half-carry the song to the next verse. The result is best encompassed by Women—though not any specific Women song but what the band might sound like if they came back and made a Loaded (1970) kind of final stab at mainstream accessibility, I guess: with the indie gene-crossing experimentation of old but geared towards popular consumption, a Frankenstein’s monster who’s too lax to ever get around to accidentally killing a defenseless villager child.