(2020) The Rentals - Q36


Review:
Matt Sharp’s slow-burning pop project The Rentals inched forward with each new album, even if those albums were sometimes separated by many years. 2014’s Lost in Alphaville was the first proper Rentals album since Seven More Minutes arrived 15 years earlier, but still found Sharp’s hyper-charged power pop progressing. Fourth studio album Q36 is easily the most ambitious offering from the Rentals, but still retains and expands on their signature elements Sharp and friends have been exploring since the project began in the mid-’90s. With 16 songs and a lengthy running time, Q36 is epic in scale alone. With recurring themes of space travel and detours into science fiction territory, the album becomes even more fantastically epic. Songs like “Teen Beat Cosmonaut,” ”Forgotten Astronaut,” “Spaceships,” and others all marry Sharp’s witty hooks and bounding synth sounds with lyrics about cosmic misadventures. Also adding to the larger-than-life feel of the album is the overblown production from Dave Fridmann, who also produced some of the best-loved work from Sharp’s old band Weezer. Many Rentals records have relied on huge drum sounds and wildly dynamic production to put the power in their power pop, but Q36 pushes past the red into new levels of pop-friendly noise. On album-opener “Shake Your Diamonds,” the drums are so distorted that they blur with the rest of the overdriven instruments into a single melodic force. Even when breaking up the bombast with acoustic guitars and strings on “Conspiracy,” the sound is still noisy and powerful. Sharp taps into his inner Bowie on several tracks, most apparently on the sly and spacy “9th Configuration.” Q36 overflows with theatrical hooks, otherworldly concepts and the kind of brilliantly straightforward pop songwriting Sharp has perfected. It’s a long album but stays on full power for its entirety, with the endlessly catchy songs of alien worlds standing as some of the brightest and strangest material the Rentals have ever delivered.


Media Report:
Genre: indie-pop, indie-rock
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits