Never Be This Boring

Fol Chen “A Tourist Town”

Fol Chen began messing around with dense, electronic pop with “Cable TV” on their debut album, and back then, it was kind of an outlier song for them. Now they’re doing that stuff full time, and their third album, The False Alarms, is like 10 variations on that theme – a clinical deconstruction of Minneapolis funk and early Timbaland, with lyrics that present a fairly mundane existence in evocative detail. There’s a few meta conceits here, and it works – there’s always an implication that the music is an interpretation of the pop songs you encounter everywhere or remember from your past, and it’s all a part of how everyday experiences are shaped. “A Tourist Town,” the best track, filters this sort of bewildered narrative about travel and drinking too much through sounds that sets up expectations for fun and relaxation, but also encourages that state of mind.

Buy it from Amazon.