I’m shocked, I’m shaken, and I’m confused that this Personal Trainer album (Still Willing) isn’t the hottest fucking thing across the entirety of the Pitchfork-reading crew of nearly-40-somethings that secretly run the internet. The YouTube videos for these songs have barely broken 1K in most cases, and how can that be?

Opener “Upper Ferntree Gully” sounds like a love song to every fantastic indie rock album I’ve listened to that predates 2010. It just makes me so happy, the shifts and turns, the pure musical adventure that the song goes through. It’s not too much, it’s just enough, and it sets the scene for an album that is so playful, earnest, inventive, and… I just don’t have enough superlative adjectives in my collection to really do it justice.

As soon as I heard it, I sent it to a friend of mine, offering it up as “like a modern Grandaddy or Pavement?” And that’s still the comparison I’d make, which seems apt as Willem Smit blatantly references Pavement, and maybe it’d be fair to accuse me of cheating–did I even think they sounded like Pavement? Or did I just hear the word “Pavement” and run with it?

Maybe I’m being too effusive. Truth be told, the album was a grower for me. I loved the opening track right away, but I haven’t listened to Grandaddy or Pavement in… nearly ever. I didn’t know how to feel about the second and third tracks, at first, because they’re not really like anything I’m currently listening to. But the fourth track, “Round”, felt good right away, with an infectious hook, a horn section, falsetto “ooh”ing, a singalong chorus–all things that I cannot live without, musical motifs that wormed into my brain and forced me to keep spinning the record again and again.

Spinning the what? You’ll learn, you’ll learn.

Yet, somehow, inexplicably, I am posting “New Bad Feeling”, which hits like a gut punch right after the jubilation of “Round”, perfectly capturing the feeling of sitting alone in your room with nothing but your regrets and the white noise in your head. The soundtrack to those moments where you’d cry, if you could, but it would be a lie, because your feelings can’t even rise to the occasion, they’re not gonna break, the feeling’s never gonna cease, and you’ll always just be the same you, in the same place you always end up.

And then the song breaks, it says no, maybe not, maybe there’s something else, someone else–someone else outside yourself that you can draw power from. Then the album slinkily slides into “Intangible”, a funky R&B groove that’d fit right in on an Yip Deceiver album.

Anyway, I don’t need to describe the whole album for you, just go and listen to it, it’s a lot of fun.