Though Riviera has a slight sheen compared to LL, the album’s best moments marry this newfound polish with the scuzzy, freewheeling instincts that made the Hellp’s early work so compelling. Raucous, Deerhunter-indebted “Revenge of the Mouse Diva” explodes with thunderous drums and a staticky synth crackle; the track has all the foreboding energy of electricity gathering before a desert storm. “Live Forever” travels on a perilously thin tightrope between being a dud and a banger, but manages to redeem itself through ridiculous airhorn-like synths and Cnossen’s smooth-as-honey vocals. It’s stupid, but it’s hard to stay too mad at a track so ecstatic and giddily unserious. Occasionally, though, polish appears to override passion. While “Doppler,” a nostalgic track with acoustic guitars and languid synths, contains some of the Hellp’s most bittersweet lyrics about the passage of time, it’s so muted and lowkey you fear it could put someone to sleep behind the wheel.
Even as Riviera marks a clearer definition of the Hellp’s own vision, there’s no shortage of references here. “Country Road” notably interpolates John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” while “Revenge of the Mouse Diva” draws its title from an essay on American painter Karen Kilimnik. Even the features feel like tropey, evocative nods to various Californian characters: Cnossen nails a coolly distant Valley Girl on several tracks, and visual artist Sophia Álvarez is tapped for “New Wave America,” where she drawls something of a Riviera manifesto, a paean to the infinite landscape, with silver screen Monica Bellucci-like sultriness: “Under the hill/Over the cloud/Riviera/Rivera sound.”
It echoes the sense of secret optimism awakened by vast, melancholic landscapes that courses throughout the record. In a recent interview, Dillon recounted a childhood memory of imagining finding, just over the crest of a hill in his hometown, a vision of a beautiful oasis that would allow him to “get away from all of this.” In reality, there was probably just more dry land, but what mattered most was letting that possibility remain a mystery, a wellspring of hope. “Meridian,” another standout, perhaps best captures this sentiment. The song begins with Dillon’s muffled vocals, crunched as if spoken from a payphone miles away, before breaking open into an unexpectedly earnest, saccharine pop-rock chorus: “Does it feel like/You’re the solo act/’Cause it’s my heart/You’re the only one.” The roads might lead nowhere, but that doesn’t mean there’s nowhere to go.
