Porches
Shirt
DOMINO
Ever since starting Porches at the beginning of last decade, Aaron Maine has been able to toe a particularly thin line of his own making. Though he’s slowly moved beyond his lo-fi bedroom-pop origins, he has remained wholly idiosyncratic, embracing mainstream pop signifiers while maintaining a reserved and withholding streak, peddling in both merry absurdity and harsh vulnerability. His newest record, Shirt, is perhaps the most emblematic example yet of his desire to remain as slippery and unknowable an entity as ever—and although that does come with its own price, few can balance such an act quite as well.
Porches was never exactly a subtle project, but Shirt is without a doubt the most expansive, dense record Maine has ever put together. It’s simply stuffed with musical ideas, often breakneck in its shifts from mammoth ’90s alt-rock, to skittery, Auto-Tune pop, to hypnotic finger-picking folk. The chaos mostly works, perhaps curtailing a bit the more inherently cloying aspects of the Porches experience. For some, this may be precisely the proof they needed of an emperor with no clothes, a songwriter whose insistence on anarchy belies something a little hollow at the core. For me, Shirt lands somewhere in the middle. The fleeting nature of its best moments—the surprising tenderness of “Voices in My Head,” the chunky bravado of “Rag,” the playful swagger of “Return of the Goat”—are as buoyed by their impermanence as the record’s worst moments are saved by it. And in the end, Maine’s pop sensibilities ultimately win out.
Lyrically, Shirt is perhaps even more opaque. The animating principle of much of Maine’s work could always be boiled down to the question of whether—to borrow a British phrase—he’s taking the piss. “Rag” is one of the most undeniable tracks Maine has ever written and rightly served as Shirt’s debut single, but features such lines as “I wanna fuck you at the moat tonight,” “I recognize you from the pound tonight,” and “Bag in the hand, dog’s biting extra nice.” This absurdism persists throughout, at times pushing past farce toward edgelord provocation.
If there is a throughline holding these musings together, it seems to be the duality of the Biblical and the animal: “God” and “dog” seem to be the twin pillars of Maine’s psyche throughout. “God’s grace, got blood inside my mouth,” he sings on “Joker” before launching into a chorus which begins, “Pick my dog up at the pound.” The battle between the feral and the devout plays itself out on much of the record, with neither truly held in high esteem. PR materials make a note of Shirt’s effort to explore “the tension between one’s person and persona”—and perhaps that’s just what Maine is getting at with all this bluster and piety. But this can be difficult to decipher behind all the one-liners, which often overwhelm the record’s intent.
Then, just as I reach that conclusion, we arrive at the record’s closing track, “Music.” In a moment of apparent vulnerability—the first on the album—Maine forces us to question nearly every bit of music heard before. In a droning piano ballad, he seems posed to take stock of his now 14-year career, interrogating the fundamental place music has held within his existence. “All my life, all I’ve known, all it was, was rock and roll,” he sings in sullen Auto-Tune before later concluding, “It was never meant to last, and I think it’s time to go / I pray to God the music takes me home.” And then the record is over.
It’s quite an anvil to smash on the proceedings, especially when you consider the antics that come before. The song both undercuts and crystallizes all of that—he might be taking the piss or he might be devastatingly sincere, but on Shirts, he does a hell of a job of splitting the difference.
