Honestly, I’m not sure where to begin with my review of this excellent new Pedro the Lion album. The third installment of his musical memoir, Santa Cruz finds David Bazan telling some very pointed stories about his adolescence. The narrative traverses eight years and several cities in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, complete with stops for physical intimacy, emotional frustration, and spiritual quandary. It’s an exercise in catharsis through pain that deeply resonates with me. Then again, I have always connected with his overall lyrical approach.
The music feels very familiar.
The overall arrangements are direct and pointed with very few frills. Bazan loves a tight pop song structure, and nothing here goes over the four-minute mark. The sharp guitar licks keen with energy, the drums ripple with rich syncopation, and the bass lines showcase a love of punch and movement. I know this sound. I’ve listened to it for decades now. It’s a balm for my ears and soul.
However, the low-key love affair with the synthesizer he began in 2005 under the name Headphones rises to the forefront of this eleven-song project. Released on Polyvinyl, Santa Cruz delights in minor key odes that hearken to woebegone ‘60s pop and melancholy ‘90s indie. Bazan chooses to ramp up the angst several notches by using broken chord arpeggios and glowering synth grooves. The music alternately swirls, festers, and foments to reflect the tumultuous moods of the lyrics. No one ever said that singing honestly about your teenaged years would be easy.
Then again, my trouble lies with those themes and experiences.
Not because I don’t understand them but because I understand them too much. As I’ve discussed before in other reviews of his music, I find myself in Bazan’s songs. In his overall story. In some of the decisions and public reckonings he’s had and continues to have with the evangelical Christianity of his youth. When I hear lyrics talk brazenly about certain theological choices, I weep because I remember having to make such decisions myself.
This album provides a taut exploration of Bazan’s upbringing that cuts me to my core. It might be the most personal statement of former evangelical belief and current exvangelical exhaustion ever set to music. He talks openly about how his worldview slowly fractured throughout his adolescence: from finding new friends and making his own music to spiritual “code-switching” where he showed one face to his parents and the church while showing another face at school. On eleven songs filled with crushing revelations, I felt each one in my guts.
Santa Cruz also acknowledges and embraces failure.
It’s a survey of Bazan’s various fuck ups on the way to growing up. You can feel that he’s frustrated with himself and fed-up with the trajectory of his life, but he also understands that mistakes are often life’s best teacher. It’s why every track feels like a deep breath with an exhalation of relief and a bittersweet edge. For each instance where he’s seeking, grasping, or needing a way out of his old life, he’s also hoping, chasing, and pursuing a better one – even if he has no clue what that might look like.
These songs are honest to a fault, the sort of honesty that can only come with time, distance, and therapy.
On the title track, he talks about wanting to be cool in his new town, but he’s stuck shopping at Mervyn’s and listening to Christian rock. With “Little Help,” he recounts the time he heard The Beatles for the first time sleeping over at a friend’s house. The best tune on the project, “Don’t Cry Now,” is a Davidic lament of longing right out of the Psalms over a thick bed of ‘80s synth-pop gloom. “Modesto” tells the story of working lame jobs after high school, eventually leading to the revelation that he needed to move to Seattle to start the next phase of his life.
So when I say I’m troubled by what I hear in Santa Cruz, it’s because I’m worried that the ideas in these songs might not make sense to everyone, not even long-term fans of Pedro the Lion. Because David Bazan has written some of the best tunes in his entire career with this album. He has carefully excavated his painful past, not as an exercise in trauma dumping, but to unearth stories with substance and heart. Then again, just because someone might not relate to growing up in twentieth century evangelical Christianity doesn’t mean they can’t relate to leaving behind old and harmful beliefs for a more fulfilling and authentic life.