A new project from Boy Scouts songwriter Taylor Vick expands her homespun sound into spectral, immersive dream pop.
Taylor Vick makes feeling like shit seem worthwhile. Recording under the name Boy Scouts, the Oakland native paints vivid scenes of annihilating, enlivening pain, her songs dramatizing the belief that big feelings are better than no feelings. On the first album by Art Moore—her new collaborative project with Los Angeles-based musicians Sam Durkes and Trevor Brooks—she sings about sleepless nights, unyielding heartache, and memories so haunting that they infect every moment of her waking life. Like her past work, the record straddles the line between succumbing to present-day suffering and smothering herself in the pleasures of the past, but Durkes and Brooks’ swooning, blissed-out production offers a new landing place: It’s Vick’s dreamiest and most immersive album, an impressive addition to her prolific catalog.
As Boy Scouts, Vick spent the latter half of the 2010s uploading a surfeit of full-length projects and EPs to Bandcamp. Her guitar-backed indie pop hit its stride on her two most recent albums, Free Company and Wayfinder: spunky, sapient records that showed off her perceptive songwriting and subtly dense arrangements. When she linked up with Durkes and Brookes in 2020, the trio entered the studio hoping to make a few tracks to pitch to various film and TV projects. Soon they realized they were onto something bigger. Though the pandemic cut their studio time short, they continued working remotely. Durkes and Brooks began adding synths and programmed drums to Vick’s guitars and stacked vocal melodies, morphing her once homespun sound into sensuous, spectral dream pop.
The interplay between Vick’s singer-songwriter roots and Durkes and Brookes’ synth-laden production evokes the sumptuousness of 2010s bands like Beach House and Wild Nothing. But Art Moore still sticks to Boy Scouts’ rawer indie rock sweet spot; the first four songs—“Muscle Memory,” “Sixish,” “Snowy,” and “Bell”—are built from guitars and dusty studio drums, and Vick’s listless singing sounds like it could be lifted from any number of Boy Scouts tracks. The album’s second half, however, introduces more electronic elements, and Vick experiments with new cadences and harmonies. On “Rewind,” a plodding guitar pluck blends into hi-fi synths and ambient whirring as Vick slides into her upper register, cooing softly as the song descends into distortion. “Something Holy,” another late album highlight, is a stirring electro ballad embellished with beeps, a tinkly bell synth, and processed ad-libs. It also includes some of her sharpest writing: “Well, you told a lie/That something holy could never die.”
In her lyrics, Vick explores the complexities of heartbreak, the mutilating power of memory, and the disorienting fugue state between dream and sleep—themes that she renders with an understated, sophisticated touch. It’s not always clear when she’s writing literally or figuratively, like on “Habit,” when she recalls how her ex used to water their garden, or how she sleeps with the lights on to avoid love-longing dreams. To Vick, dreams are not heartwarming intuition chambers but essential venues for escape, the only space for her to recreate the world as she sees fit. On “A Different Life,” she sings that, in her dreams, her life seems “full of meaning.” She’s alive in these subconscious moments, and the music becomes an attempt to prolong them and make them real.
Vick has described Art Moore as a more abstract project than Boy Scouts: “I love writing my personal shit,” she said in a recent interview, “but I was at this point in my life where I wanted a break.” She describes these songs as “short stories” that may or may not be about her own experience—the line isn’t always clear, even to her. Autobiographical or not, the narratives feel just as personal as any Boy Scouts record, and maybe even more so. While Free Company and Wayfinder were rife with wry one-liners and observations to offset the otherwise emotionally knotty writing, Art Moore is a bruising and remorseful record that aches without reservation.
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