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[5.75]

Anthony Easton: The heteronormative trap of wife and children is often thought of something to avoid in popular music, and the inclusion of that, and the phrase making love, and the idea of ripping apart the socialists abuts with the chorus of taking a walk, and either this is profound irony, mocking the expectations of the middle class, or Passion Pit are hella stealth Christians. That they mention pension funds being gone, or the plight of the immigrants, or that the making love becomes a way of evading the lifestyle they have to front — the narrative is ambiguous. I don’t know — I want to read it as earnest, because there is something so out of reach and so profoundly joyous when I spend the evening or the afternoon in the back yards of my suburban, straight, evangelical friends, with their friends and their kids. I have tried to write about how that makes me feel, and you know — I don’t know how they pay for what they need to pay for, and if I can barely pay the rent on my bedsit, I have no idea how they buy a house in the suburbs. I see all of that tension here, and earnest seems to be the wrong word. I still don’t know how to elegantly depict the sincerity of a struggle that is only occasionally my own. I wonder if Passion Pit has figured out how.
[8]

Iain Mew: Sounds like Death Cab gone vaguely dance (those “oh oh oh”s especially are straight out of “Lightness”). I still like a lot of Death Cab! I don’t think even they have ever approached this high a ratio of wordiness:impact though.
[4]

Alfred Soto: The synth gunk bothers me less than the distortion that swathes Michael Angelakos’ vocals, although the arch hook and cute harmonies do their best too. Remix this fucker and watch it chase Goyte up the charts as the recherché teen pop it is. 
[5]

Brad Shoup: Real similar to Modest Mouse’s “Float On”: a lighty-funky, four-on-the-floor tune that explicitly holds up vignettes as signposts for a great truth. Weirdly, Brock’s shaggy tune is more cohesive than Passion Pit’s. Quickly abandoning the AAB rhyme scheme, Michael Angelakos tries to match his pipsqueak tenor to the gravity of the (personally relevant) stories. The child’s Cameo synth-riff is a naughty squiggle, an instrumental shrug along the lines of the refrain’s dubious solution. They’re punching above their weight (the line about socialists and their taxes is supposed to sound tossed-off, but not like this), which is another way of saying noble failure, which is another way to describe ambition.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: It’s got a tune and some politics, and neither is particularly compelling. “But then my partner called to say the pension funds were gone/He made some bad investments, now the accounts are overdrawn.” This a song populated by rhetorical devices, not characters.
[5]

Andy Hutchins: All the newly muscular musicality still works as well as the dreamy Manners-era stuff, but if you listen real close, they’re saying some things. I like it when bands do that.
[7]

Jonathan Bogart: MGMT going for both the rise and the plod of Big Country? Something like that, anyway; the flanged synth saws like a violin in a U2 song, but never attempts the crescendos that make listening to U2 worthwhile.
[5]

Jamieson Cox: The pop landscape has shifted slightly since Passion Pit’s halcyon days of “Sleepyhead” and Manners, and so I wouldn’t be surprised if the band had a breakout year. “Take a Walk” isn’t too far away from “We Are Young,” another slice of big tent, heart-on-sleeve pop music delivered by a male vocalist with versatile pipes. But I find this strangely empty in spite of its attempted profundities and junior political commentary; maybe it’s the sort of song that needs to be heard in that aforementioned big tent in order to deliver the emotional impact it’s striving for. 
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