Album Of The Week: Tanlines Mixed Emotions

Jesse Cohen and Eric Emm, the two halves of the Brooklyn duo Tanlines, don't come from studio-pop. Cohen first came to our attention as the leader of Professor Murder, a clattering and scrappy dance-punk band who figured out, like Liquid Liquid and Radio 4 before them, that postpunk sounds really good when it has a whole shit-ton of percussion; I seem to remember Cohen spending a lot of time blowing a whistle at their live shows. Emm, meanwhile, has roots that go even deeper into the underground; he was a member of the math-addled post-rock bands Don Caballero and Storm & Stress. Tanlines started when they got together to remix a Telepathe song, and they spent their early time together putting together hazy, vaguely tropical productions and editing them into fuzzed-out, non-sequitur YouTube clips. None of that would seem to prefigure a turn toward big, populist dance-pop grooves, the type of things that ad-licensers go apeshit for. But that's exactly what they've given us with Mixed Emotions, their long-awaited debut: An album of big, gorgeous songs that seem destined to dissolve into the air and linger there like summertime water vapor.