Haim’s “I Quit” is not quite a breakup album and not quite a moving-on album; rather, the fourth LP by this beloved Los Angeles sister trio lands somewhere between those tried-and-true schemes: Its title inspired, the Haims have said, by a third-act mic drop in the cult-fave 1996 movie “That Thing You Do!,” “I Quit” is about looking back from the middle distance on a relationship that didn’t work and assessing what you learned (and what you didn’t) from the experience.
“Can I have your attention, please, for the last time before I leave?” Danielle Haim sings over a trembling acoustic guitar riff to open the album with “Gone.” Then: “On second thought, I changed my mind.” In “All Over Me,” she’s exulting in the erotic thrill of a new situationship — “Take off your clothes / Unlock your door / ’Cause when I come over / You’re gonna get some” — while warning the guy not to get out over his skis as any kind of partner. Este Haim takes over lead vocals for “Cry,” in which she’s unsure of her place in the seven stages of grief: “I’m past the anger, past the rage, but the hurt ain’t gone.”
How to musicalize such a state of transition? On “I Quit,” which Danielle co-produced with Rostam Batmanglij, the sisters do it with songs that go in multiple directions at once, as in “Relationships,” which sounds like “Funky Divas” meets “Tango in the Night,” and “Everybody’s Trying to Figure Me Out,” a deconstructed blues strut that bursts into psych-pop color in the chorus. They do it by trying new things, as in the shoegazing “Lucky Stars” and “Spinning,” which has Alana Haim cooing breathily over a shuffling disco beat. (In some ways, “I Quit” feels closely aligned with the newly sexed-up “Sable, Fable” by Bon Iver, whose Justin Vernon was involved in a couple of songs on this album.)
The Haims also do it, of course, by revisiting familiar comforts: “Gone” samples George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90”; “Down to Be Wrong” evokes the blistered euphoria of peak Sheryl Crow; “Now It’s Time,” for some goofy reason, borrows the industrial-funk groove from U2’s “Numb.”
Nostalgia figures into the lyrics too, but it’s all very sharply drawn, as in “Take Me Back,” a caffeinated folk-rock shimmy where Danielle is thinking about the people she used to know in the Valley — “David only wants to do what David wants / Had a bald spot, now it’s a parking lot” — and how much easier things were when she’d cruise Kling Street “looking for a place to park in an empty parking lot just so you can feel me up.” (Great guitar solo in this one.) In “Down to Be Wrong,” she looks out from her window seat on a flight to somewhere and sees “the street where we used to sleep” — a reference, one presumes, to her ex Ariel Rechtshaid, who helped produce Haim’s first three albums and whose presence looms here like a phantom.
Case in point: “‘We want to see you smiling,’ said my mother on the hill,” Danielle sings in the loping country ballad “The Farm,” “But the distance keeps widening between what I let myself say and what I feel.” Oof. Yet on an album about choosing who to leave behind and who to collide with for the first time, “The Farm’s” emotional climax comes in a touching verse where one of Danielle’s sisters tells her she’s welcome to crash “if you need a place to calm down till you get back on your feet.” The upheaval won’t last; family is forever.
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