Constant Smiles - The Weight

From the album "Paragons"
Out NOW on Sacred Bones Records

Typically, a band’s big indie label debut doesn't come 15 albums into its career, but with Constant Smiles’ Paragons, here we are.

Primary songwriter and sole “constant” member Ben Jones—who considers Constant Smiles a collective—sees its impressive output as a way to document the group’s evolution. Since its live debut as a noise duo on Ben’s home of Martha’s Vineyard in 2009, Constant Smiles has grown to include contributions from 50 other members, all of whom have personal connections to the group’s extended family. And while the collective has indulged an array of musical whims along the way—including Ben’s penchant for penning a new set’s worth of material for each live performance—Constant Smiles’ sound has tightened up considerably over their past couple of albums, in large part as a result of Ben’s working relationship with Mike Mackey, who has become his main creative partner. This increased focus manifests on Paragons in the band’s most cohesive batch of songs to date, ranging from shimmering psych-pop excursions to bittersweet, piano-and string-accented strummers, and an execution that feels like a massive step forward for the band.

Through its recent forays into dream pop and shoegaze (Control) and synth-pop (John Waters), Constant Smiles has learned how to incorporate its experimental inclinations more fluidly into the mix. Artists like Yo La Tengo, and the more recent Rat Columns, are good touchstones for Constant Smiles’ musical approach—tethering to an indie-pop core while perennially mining genres, always finding new ways to intrigue listeners and pursue a unique vision. Fans enamored with the gauzy, Slowdivish musings of Control, for instance, will now face the crisp production of Paragons, where the eeriness of downbeat tracks like “Floating” has been replaced with the yearning and confessional tone of “Daisy, Table for Three.” Elsewhere, the band’s krautrock leanings have carried forward on songs like “Please Don’t Be Late” and “Where Am I Now?” albeit covered in a new sheen—the gold leaf gleam and radiant blues of the album cover perfectly mirroring the album’s mood. And just when you think you have Paragons all figured out, you’re hit with one of Constant Smiles’ most overtly melodic surprises to date in the late album gem “Shame.”

Using The Wipers’ Silver Sail as inspiration for the album’s sound, producer Ben Greenberg dialed Constant Smiles’ trademark delay way back on Paragons to push Ben’s vocals to the foreground and reflect the still-raw subject matter of the songs. And while it doesn’t take a forensic song scientist to conclude that Paragons is a breakup record, it’s not just any kind of breakup record. Paragons is Ben’s coming to grips with the collapse of an idealized romantic relationship; the kind we’re, at one point or another, all chasing in our own lives; and the kind which, after it’s passed, has a way of haunting our present and shaping our future. Fittingly then, Paragons’ lyrics focus on the narrator’s presence within the various stages of such a relationship, including the desire to be together even after it’s over, as “Learning To Start Over” puts it, “to help to ease the pain” of the one you love who broke your heart.

The title, Paragons, itself holds a dual meaning. It refers to, in Ben’s words, his “attempt to be a more exemplary person since getting sober,” and it’s also a reference to the friends who’ve been there for him and inspired him along the way. As author Maggie Nelson puts it in her memoir The Red Parts, disastrous consequences can follow when people will away their basic dependency on others “in service of a fantasy of complete security, independence, or invulnerability.” This kind of reliance on the self is a trap that Ben had fallen into around the time he moved to New York, in 2013. Looking back, Ben realizes he had begun to retreat inwards around that time, obsessively focusing on music, and blocking others out of his life in a way he never had before. This tendency, which he would later refer to as his “destructive creative drive,” was only made worse by his addiction to drugs and alcohol, which eventually led to things falling apart in his life. Paragons, then, is a tribute to what Ben has embraced to move forward with his life; that is, what Nelson calls the inherent human need to “lean against” other people in friendship and in collaboration, which, at its heart, is what Constant Smiles has always been about.

The only constants in Constant Smiles are Ben Jones and his friends.

Chris Liberato