Carried Away

There is something architecturally strange about this track — it begins in a register of melancholy, the synths carrying a kind of bittersweet weight, but the tempo is fast enough and the production dense enough that the emotional signal becomes deliberately ambiguous, joy and sadness occupying the same sonic space simultaneously. Michael Angelakos's falsetto is the defining feature, sitting at a pitch that feels almost uncomfortably exposed, and the effect is of something fragile being carried at high speed — the vulnerability of the performance in tension with the propulsive energy around it. The layering of synthesizers is extraordinary in its density; there are sounds buried in the mix that reveal themselves on repeated listens, small melodic figures running beneath the surface like thoughts beneath speech. The lyrical content approaches emotional overwhelm from the angle of surrender rather than resistance, the idea that being carried away by feeling is sometimes not a failure but a relief. Passion Pit occupied a particular space in the late 2000s to early 2010s indie electronic scene — making music that was technically dance music but felt too emotionally weighted to function as pure escape, too melodically complex to be background. This is music for early morning when you haven't slept, for the specific altered state of exhaustion and feeling where the membrane between inside and outside gets thin.