Limited edition of 500 copies. Highly recommended. One of the finest for 2023 and yet another Album of the Year contender. The label's blurb is LENGTHY, so we'll just suggest we hear XTC, Roxy Music and even Blondie in this superb offering from an outfit formed in Seattle but now spread between there, L.A and NYC. "Sonically, Escorts finds Advertisement breaking significant new ground. Heavy dance rhythms dominate: “Dancing Scrooge” lays out a collage of stadium-sized harmonies and “Miss You”-era Stones saxophone wails over a house-inspired four-to-the-floor beat, while “Where is My Baby?” cleverly juxtaposes shrill funk guitars and naïve recorder melodies against throbbing, Suicide-adjacent hardware electronics. The band’s emotional landscape has darkened considerably, erecting walls of charmingly melancholic fog. “Eat Your Heart Out” peddles a Suede-esque vampiric drawl over contorted goth progressions, while “Point Reyes” evokes the feeling of a cherry-red Mustang driving off a sea-side cliff in slow motion, playing considered and sparse acoustic guitar lines against washed-out synths. “Eyes of the Night” carries this overriding sense of minimal, chemical-sapped bleakness to its logical conclusion, accelerating beautifully simple piano and saxophone lines towards an almost comically cathartic, bull-in-a-china-shop “Champagne Supernova” style ending. Advertisement smartly avoids drifting into melodrama, however. If “Eyes of the Night” brings Escorts’ A-side to an overtly severe coda, B-side opener “Only the Prophets” releases the tension, falling back into streamlined, Hollywood-brut riffs and phaser-kissed sneers with a sign of relief. The band’s wry sense of humor saves Escorts from fully committing to its darkest promises, constantly undercutting any sense of overt emotional sincerity with subtle, fourth-wall-breaking winks to the listener."
