No one will accuse Foxygen's We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic of being a concept album. It’s as stylistically diverse, maddening and confident as the Take The Kids Off Broadway EP, yet feels ready to enter the primetime -- a band confident that their set of skills will be accepted, or at least tolerated. This is in part thanks to the deft production of Richard Swift, whose hand truly feels like a contribution rather than a contraption. Sonically, the music is still confounding, still prone to fits of vibing followed by un-fettered freakouts. And with Foxygen there always seems to be a nod and a wink with every riff and turn. Sam France's manic vocal delivery, something like a man alternating between 103 degree fever dreams and a case of the chills, meanders mercurially throughout the record, with multi-instrumentalist Jonathan Rado accentuating his most fanciful moments. And it's this, Rado's own ability to genre-hop moment-to-moment, that remains one of the bands hallmarks and is as defining as France’s howls of poetry.
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