Pop Psychology
Album by Neon Trees
Island Records
“COME OUT as a wanderer. Come out as a questioner. One day it won’t matter. But it still does.” The author of this exhortation is Tyler Glenn, the lead singer of the alt-rock band Neon Trees, who came out in Rolling Stone earlier this year. Glenn’s confession coincided with the release of the band’s third studio album, Pop Psychology, a title reportedly inspired by the therapy he sought after a minor meltdown back in 2012 and the cancellation of some tour dates. He went on, in a Facebook post, to urge his fans: “Come out as you. That’s all I really can say. That’s what I’d say to me at 21, the scared return Mormon missionary who knew this part of himself but loved God too. You can do both. Don’t let anyone tell you [otherwise]. All my love and hope, and for now, back to the music.”
What about the music? If the song “First Things First” is any indication, music (as opposed to faith or fame) was Glenn’s first love. Over a foot-stomping beat made for the stadium, he sings, “I don’t want to be so famous/ I just want to sing until I die.” That’s the album’s final track, whereas its first, “Love in the 21st Century,” zips along at an even quicker tempo with Glenn decrying the “broken heart technology” of modern (on-line) love. The words are sometimes weak-minded—“so sweet” rhymes with “click delete”—but, collectively, Pop Psychology goes down like an energy-drink of pure power-pop, both whiney and wonderful in the tradition of Weezer and The Strokes. The album’s psychology is another matter. The object of “Text Me in the Morning” is a “damsel in distress,” but rather than rushing to her aid, the singer seeks only to be her friend: “All the other boys just want your sex/ But I just want your text.” “Sleeping with a Friend,” the album’s first (and best) single, peaked at number 51 on the U.S. Billboard chart. (The club remixes, by Kat Krazy and Ra Ra Riot, reposition the song on the dance floor, which is where it truly belongs.) Some interpret the song’s “friend” as the object of gay desire, but the lyrics are more ambiguous than that. “Teenager in Love” is the gayest song of all, with Glenn singing, “He’s a teen, a teenager in love/ What a tragic attraction.” He channels his idol Morrissey (whose naked, life-size image inhabits Glenn’s Utah home) with a cryptic allusion to unrequited same-sex love: “I’m a fool with a curse and crush.” Still, there is something a little puerile about a grown man like Glenn—who came out at age thirty and doesn’t drive—still trapped in such a teenage wasteland. Then again, he’s self-aware enough to admit, on “Living in Another World,” “I’ve been going through an awkward phase.” Some of Glenn’s stuntedness could stem from the fact that he knew he was gay at age six but had to survive in the Church of Latter Day Saints. He and guitarist Chris Allen, whom Glenn calls his “other half” (musically speaking), grew up in Murrieta, a predominantly Mormon suburb of San Diego, before moving to Utah where they later ruled the music scene in Provo. Due to the support of the Killers (also with Mormon roots), Neon Trees signed with a major label and, on their 2010 debut “Habits,” delivered high-octane hits like “Animal” and “1983.” This must have been liberating considering the Church deemed Glenn’s clothing “distracting,” and, on a two-year mission to Nebraska, he was forbidden to play secular music. He would go into a closet, he told Rolling Stone, where he jammed in secret. The significance of a gay Mormon boy retreating into an actual closet is hard to miss. Anyone familiar with the musical The Book of Mormon knows the comic number “Turn it Off,” in which Mormon missionaries offer each other a bit of friendly advice, which is to sublimate their gay desires. “Just go click/ It’s a cool little Mormon trick,” sings Elder McKinley, “When you’re feeling certain feelings that just don’t seem right, treat those pesky feelings like a reading light/ And turn ’em off!” Now that Tyler Glenn has finally flipped the switch, Neon Trees sounds better than ever, even if some of that raw rock id that powered Animal has softened. “We’re both young hot-blooded people,” he sings, “to become one, it could be lethal.”
Colin Carman PhD teaches British and American literature at Colorado Mesa University.
