“You Never Knew” Is HAIM’s Fleetwood Mac and Prince Cosplay at Its Finest
HAIM’s long-anticipated sophomore album Something to Tell You is out today, and what it has to tell you, in essence, is not so different from what the trio had to tell you four years ago with their debut Days Are Gone. The tweaks to the band’s sound are normally pleasant, depending on how you feel about electronic ephemera and odd, pitch-shifted versions of the HAIM sisters invading their normal pleasant, balmy retro-pop. These glitchy flourishes place us firmly in pop music’s present day, as well as conjuring images of Este, Danielle, and Alana sitting around getting high to 22, A Million or maybe Laurie Anderson.
I once said to a friend (and thankfully refrained from bearing out this idea in writing) that one could reasonably pair every track from Days Are Gone to a reminiscent track on Fleetwood Mac’s 1987 album Tango in the Night. But “You Never Knew” makes me believe that the likes of “Forever” were only the beginning of HAIM’s mining of that source material. Here the bright, spidery, acoustic guitar bursts, straight out of the Lindsay Buckingham playbook, are perhaps the most immediate signifiers, especially when paired with a soft, slowly-arpeggiated synth and a gently assured, very-Christine McVie-esque vocal performance from Danielle Haim. It’s worth noting that Danielle also intercuts…