In a recent column for the New Yorker, writer Kyle Chayka details a “lo-fi rebellion” against the aesthetics of tech-driven uniformity: “Anything that appears too smooth these days is suspicious,” he says, citing a recent Weezer tour poster featuring the “Cool S,” the universal sigil of our shared humanity, as a counter-example. Chayka’s subjects primarily operate in the visual worlds of marketing and design, but it’s easy to identify sonic parallels. The kids are selling their turntables and buying guitars, saving rock’n’roll, and banging their heads until they incur nerve damage. In the face of A.I. homogeneity, the human —embodied, subjective, flawed—is in.
MASK, a new collection of songs from Aaron Maine’s indie pop project Porches, is similarly atavistic, down to the scanned, handwritten letter Maine shared on Instagram on the night of its release. Taped on a four-track recorder in his New York City apartment, these nine songs—a mixtape, the accompanying press release is careful to note; not a new album, which might suggest a degree of studio sheen—are necessarily unrefined. They’re artifacts of wrestling with physical limitations: The unpolished yelp on “Innocence,” the drums that take rhythm as more of a suggestion on “Habit,” the gauzy veil over Maine’s guitar on “Spring” are all heightened by their imperfections, indelible thumbprints of the production process. Stripped of digital refinement, the spit-shined melodies on MASK gleam almost in spite of themselves.
No score yet, be the first to add.
There were hints of this analog shift on Porches’ 2024 record Shirt: Songs like “Voices in My Head” lacked the heavy vocal processing that, since 2016’s Pool, have shifted Maine’s rockist tendencies into more strangely alien shapes. Last year, Maine pressed vinyl reissues of his 2011 releases Summer of Ten and Scrap and Love Songs Revisited, the latter also recorded on a trusty four-track. These early songs rattled with potential that exceeded their tinny recordings, and provide a useful comparison to the pared-back approach on MASK.
Though the songs on MASK are part of this lineage, they also feel more mature, aided by additional instrumentation and slower pacing. Perceived shortcomings—tape hiss, voice cracks—sound more intentional, their grit and grime an active choice rather than an economic necessity. “Caroline” is a grunge-inflected love song that layers violins atop an electric guitar and Maine’s crackling croon, which fittingly describes romance via pissing his lover’s name in the snow. “Pollen in the Rain” makes a tossed off vocal tic— “Pshah, for sure”— sound profound, backed by a somber piano and surrounded by imagery of early spring.
There’s an ease and organicism to these melodies that recalls the ramshackle sparkle of Arthur Russell’s home recordings, or Daniel Johnston’s slanted pop songs. Battling the constraints of his equipment, these songs rest on the strength of Maine’s unexpected rhymes and knack for song structure. It’s perhaps intentional that the album’s title track is a song about removing a shield between him and the world: When he sings “I’m choking in my mask,” jumping up an octave, it’s hard not to see it as a gesture to the ways digital distortion had dampened the immediacy of Porches’ music.
Long before Ableton or GarageBand, four-track recorders democratized the process of making music—with a little practice, anyone could tape reasonably fleshed-out demos, spawning one-man bands in their basements. The four-track, which offers virtually no ability to edit recordings after the fact, forces musicians to accept the flaws in their work by default. “I feel like a special spirit was captured in these recordings by embracing their imperfections,” Maine said in a press release about MASK. The mixtape’s spirit (or aura, if you want to get Frankfurt School about it) is undeniably present, a reflection of the room it was recorded in as much as any other instrument. Stripped of modern tools, MASK is messy, blemished, unfinished—and all the sweeter for it.
