***So long as there has been madness, there has been art that tries to arrest its shape, art that tries to capture its lack of coherency and fashion something beautiful out of the stupidity. On Escorts, Advertisement leans into the romance of such foolish, magical thinking. The LP—their second, following 2020’s American Advertisement—is an impressionistic ode to the tragic comedy of contemporary life. Advertisement metabolizes the sounds of good nights gone awry with startling clarity, shifting effortlessly from glossy, leather-doused glam rock to glitching, Kraut-inspired spirals, Scott Walker-tinged empty pub revelries to industrialized club loops.
Running off the back of American Advertisement, as well as a string of standalone singles with Hardly Art Records and Fire Talk Records, Advertisement devoted the bulk of the intervening years between LPs to touring alongside the likes of The War on Drugs, Surfbort, Sheer Mag, Spiritual Cramp, and Narrow Head. Throughout the course of the American Advertisement tour cycle, the band became increasingly disaffected with the stylistic limitations of the live band oriented, English-invasion-meets-Americana rock ethos that defined their first LP. In search of something more formally exciting, Advertisement scattered across the country, landing in between Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York City. They proceeded to piece together the tracks for Escorts in a piecemeal fashion, passing a slurry of Frankensteined home-demos back and forth over email in what became a slow, methodical exchange of ideas. Advertisement reconvened in Los Angeles during the summer of 2022 to record Escorts, enlisting the help of engineer/mixer Mike Kriebel (Osees, Ty Segall, Mild High Club), who tracked the record in between Ty Segall’s Topanga Canyon home studio and his own private studio in Glassell Park. The end result is a record that bears increasing energetic resemblance to the chameleon-like, attitude-over-genre sensibility of both early forebears like Roxy Music and Amon Duul as well as more recent contemporaries like Total Control, The Men, and Milk Music.
With Escorts, Advertisement provides a convincing argument for guitar-driven rock’s continued ability to reflect the maddening incoherency of the world around us. Moving with a cadence which is at once both tragic and lighthearted, melancholic and laughable, Advertisement confront the delirium of modern life and twist it into something subtly charming. At heart, Escorts is a reminder that the most beautiful aspects of life are also the most disappointing, the most sensible course of action often the most stupid. In Advertisement’s world, only the fool makes the rules—to that end, the only recourse is to lean in.
