Album Review: Foxygen - ...And Star Power

Sprawling across an epic 24 tracks this immersive album mystically draws its power from the stars in the sky as much as it does from collaborations with stars like The Flaming Lips, White Fence and Bleached among others.

Taking off with Star Power Airlines, the view from Foxygen’s A380 is astonishing as we drift through the perfectly-formed clouds of fluffy retro pop that’s all groovy psychedelic. While How Can You Really is an irresistible pop nugget with big hooks that’s hard to beat, tracks like Coulda Been My Love and You And I offer sweet dreamy vibes that feel like post-Beatles Lennon and very mellow Stones. Imperfectly lo-fi, these tunes radiate a luscious irresistible warmth that stylistically slips somewhere between the ‘60s and the ‘70s.

We’re soaring through the stratosphere and feeling fine when Foxygen start to head into outer space with what is ostensibly a four-part rock opera that’s an hallucinatory freak-out gone Broadway. The curtain comes down but the trip isn’t over. Lucy in the sky has nothing on the lysergic vibes Foxygen conjure as we jump on mattresses in the Mattress Warehouse or dream of good times and lose our minds to Cannibal Holocaust.

Everything that goes up eventually comes down hard. Can’t Contextualize My Mind, Talk and Brooklyn Police Station come down hard on a sinister, cacophonous, almost punk note that feels like waking from a nightmare. Loose and rambling, the Star Power experience encapsulates the maturing genius of Foxygen.