A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This is a sort of new beginning for Sam Ray. While it isn’t a far cry from the sound that made the band (previously known as Teen Suicide) popular, with a charming lo-fi pop sound, it takes American Pleasure Club to totally new heights and finds them incorporating a host of new influences into their style.
Like the picture on the album cover, A Whole Fucking Lifetime of This is a mosaic of sounds, both electronic and organic. While the band had dabbled in electronics before (and Ray had an electronic solo project as Ricky Eat Acid), they’ve never been as focal as they are on this record. Songs like “Sycamore” and “Let’s Go to the Desert” are built around samples, pitch-shifted to the point of unrecognizability. Then there’s “Eating Cherries,” one of the weirdest songs on the album. While it isn’t terrible, Ray’s vocals are slathered in vocoder, which makes for a pretty dissonant contrast with the soft piano in the background.
Dissonant or not, it leads well into the album’s closer “The Sun Was in My Eyes,” likely the best song on the album. It’s about as far from the sound of “Eating Cherries” as you can get, recalling the echoed, sparse tones of early Carissa’s Wierd material. After such a bizarre, eclectic record, it’s a nice moment that grounds the album – the comedown after a long night of partying, but much prettier and without the headache. If this is American Pleasure Club now, I’ll take a whole fucking lifetime of it.