By stripping away the experimentation, Sinister Grift is a reminder of something that’s always set Lennox apart: He’s an exceptionally gifted songwriter. Nearly every track on Sinister Grift feels like it could’ve been written at any point in the last 50 years—or even longer ago, in the case of the strolling Everly Brothers-style lament “Anywhere But Here.” “Praise” opens the album with a splash of reverbed snare and sets out on a soft skanking rhythm while sunshine-bright harmonies blast through, just a hint of minor-key cloud drifting in and out of the verse. “My heart, it bends before it breaks,” Lennox sings as the melody descends; Raveda responds, “Only wanna give it to you,” bringing the melody back up. The shape of their two-line call and response mimics the bend in the lyric, and as the song unfolds, Lennox’s narrator seems to grow more resilient, even as he waits for a troubled relationship to either flex back to center or shatter completely. “I’m moving and I’m watching how you do,” he sings, “again and again and again,” bouncing the latter line across his vocal range as if he’s not quite sure where he stands.
Sadness and regret lurk at the edges of Sinister Grift, and they grow as the album proceeds. Lennox’s narrators are caught up in uncertain futures, trying hard to find a way back to a romantic connection they suspect might be completely severed. A pedal steel guitar weeps behind the shimmering wah-wah shuffle of “50mg” as Lennox sings about the stony silences that seem to be the only thing he now shares with a partner. “Engines running, I can feel the miles,” he sings, the prism of harmonies around him shot through with the deep blues and violets of an island sunset. As darkness overtakes the album’s sunny demeanor in “Venom’s In” and especially “Elegy for Noah Lou,” the arrangements become more spare. The latter is the album’s most unadorned track, a lonesome six-minute sigh of velveteen pastoral folk that Lennox sings in a creamy tone, scooping to the bottom of his register in a graceful downward arc as he searches for terra firma, a dusting of reverb the only effect on his voice. It’s the kind of straightforward, plainly beautiful song a younger Panda Bear might have admired but wouldn’t have dared to try; its nakedness is startling.
The album’s somewhat uneasy relationship to its own lightness is part of its charm and central to its ethos; Lennox has never sounded so playful or at ease. In “Ends Meet,” he spits the word “gut” like it’s a watermelon seed, then takes the word “do” for a long walk, breaking his voice across a fluttering melody. In “50mg,” a song almost certainly named for a THC dose strong enough to wig out a normie for a week, his voice hacky-sacks the words “it’s gone” back and forth from left channel to right, a chilled-out take on the chop-chop vocal crossfades of Grim Reaper’s “Boys Latin.” He kicks off closer “Defense” by singing the title like he’s at a football game, then hands things over to Cindy Lee, who rips a guitar solo through the song’s middle.
