by Eric Bennett (@seething_coast)
On their latest full length, Chicago mainstay Varsity has given their scrappy indie pop a shiny new coat of paint. Led by vocalist and keyboardist Stef Smith, Varsity has remained a very singular act among its contemporaries. Smith has said she enjoys making listeners work to put them into a box. Their sound has been revised with each release since they formed in 2013 - it’s hard to pin anything that unstable. What has remained static, though, is the persevering spirit at the core of their music. Even when broaching darker topics, there is an optimism present that is absent from their peers. Their new album Fine Forever takes that resilience and embraces it at every juncture.
While many artists often opt to sequence their albums in a way that optimizes them for streaming: shoving the best to the top only to let the end drag, Fine Forever, builds as it goes along. While opener “Runaway” and the title track that follows it are perfectly fine songs, they feel very similar. Each is bombastic, glowing with a jazzy tinge. It’s as the tracklist goes on that we see more diverse melodies. Many of the highest points come deep in the tracklist, a reward for those who spin it the whole way through. The glimmering “Heaven Sent” is a sighing send up of the oft written about, rarely damaged “Hollywood machine”. Smith takes little jabs at capitalism with one of their best opening lines to date: “Hey / Don’t you hate / Holidays in the United States.” On the sprightly “Reason to Run,” Smith sings about the push and pull of a rocky relationship: “Now you’re pulling me back into orbit / Feel like a moth to a flame / Treat me like I got a disease / But it’s worth it”. Bandmates and brothers Paul and Jake Stolz get a nice moment of interplay as their respective bass and drums weave together to forge one of the album's most infectious melodies.
No artist can foresee what the world where their art will be experienced, releasing albums months into a pandemic is both an opportunity, and a choice that comes with unprecedented questions. Many artists would have jumped at the chance to scrub any content of the ongoing pandemic, yet they chose not to. The album’s closer, “Sicko World” is one of their most structurally interesting, and a huge leap for them. It’s lyrics delve into the fear of our own intrusive thoughts: if someone could hear that, would they find us evil? There are a few lines, though, that turn the song into a publicist’s faustian bargain. Lines like “When [are] they gonna find a cure?” and “Quarantine is what I need / Just give me a good book and break off the key.”
Varsity have never seemed comfortable following trends, opting instead to tamp down their own path. Involved with constantly trying new things is the risk of failing, and while some of their ideas land better than others, the 70’s influence and bright jazz instrumentation peppered throughout Fine Forever are a triumph.