Almanac Music: ‘Paradise State of Mind’ – Foster the People: Album review
Paradise State of Mind – Foster the People
Rating: 1.5/5
A seven-year wait for Foster the People’s fourth studio album has proven fruitless.
My journey with Foster the People, hitherto my favourite band, began close to 15 years ago in 2010.
I heard a new sound on the radio, at the same time harking back to a guitar-driven era of surf rock, with the first airplay of Pumped Up Kicks late that year.
Upon release of their debut album Torches, I borrowed the CD from my local library, and was enchanted by the creativity, musicality, lyricism and emotional candour on display. My first album purchase was the Torches Australian Tour Edition. For the following decade-plus until their hiatus, I devoured Foster the People’s follow-up albums Supermodel and Sacred Hearts Club, recognising their value and versatility, all from a songwriter who outspokenly eschewed celebrity, hyper-consumerism and superficiality.
The sheer musicianship and bold experimentation on these albums lifted and inspired me, and I defended the band against the critical hate reviewers seemed to lavish on them, content to condemn Mark Foster as a one-hit wonder without generating a modicum of value themselves.
And then it happened.
After three years of radio silence and seven years since their last full-length album, Foster the People reappeared with Paradise State of Mind in August 2024.
A product of the vapid Hollywood scene the band finds itself in, the album sees Mark Foster fall prey to the very derivative, throwaway summer music he once railed against.
Foster once joked that his band gives their B-sides to Imagine Dragons, a comment he later apologised for. At present, Foster would be lucky to have the Dragons’ C- or D-sides propping up his LP.
Remaining members Foster and Isom Innis are both married to relatively well-known actresses. While Mark has been scoring some films and series of his own during the band’s hiatus, and dodging accusations of full-time hobnobbing with LA’s elite, it’s clear his creative well has run dry. The result? A record as superficial and soulless as a red carpet photoshoot.
Three band members down, and finally committing his first expletives to record at age 40, the cracks and the weariness are starting to show.
Foster, who retains lead singer duties on the album – a symbol of his fierce creative control over the band – clearly has Innis’ production duties clamped in a vice too.
For an example of his true potential as a beatmaker, check out his solo effort and a much better album, Acid Star, credited to Innis’ side project Peel.
Innis is given a moment to shine on the heavier track ‘Feed Me’ but, production-wise, the song feels much like a stripped-back version of Peel’s own ‘Mall Goth’.
One of the album’s few highlights is the joyous opening track ‘See You in the Afterlife’. Even then, the experience is sullied by Mark Foster’s stubbornness as he somehow manages to mispronounce the word “kaleidoscopic”.
Aside from ‘Lost in Space’, an uptempo guilty pleasure via a foray into disco, the album’s other interesting tracks are in the form of previously-released singles ‘Take Me Back’ and ‘Chasing Low Vibrations’. Surprisingly, as the first two explicit songs in the band’s discography, they are also the most intriguing on the album. Where Foster formerly relied on allegories and philosophical turns of phrase to express emotion, he is now forced to cuss instead.
Other tracks are plagued by Foster’s persistence in a chantlike falsetto, almost resembling a bad pastiche of Frankie Valli. This is supplemented with some questionable use of autotune, and stylised vocals with minimal backing, as Foster yearns to appear outwardly unique.
‘A Diamond to be Born’ is a restrained (in fact plain boring) conclusion to the album (not unlike ‘III’ (on Sacred Hearts Club). Perhaps Foster is no longer as good as he thinks he is, or possibly he has confused abrasive self-confidence with artistry. Regardless, the album fails to live up to the standards expected of an established band. Noticeably, the LP is lyrically predicated on thoughts of the afterlife, as though a preoccupation with death could itself infuse meaning into the album.
Perhaps the most baffling moment of the album is found on ‘Glitchzig’, a track which culminates in a self-indulgent saxophone solo of over two minutes that only serves to underscore Foster’s ballooning ego.
True, this self-absorption emphasises a greater problem in Foster’s body of work since switching labels from Columbia, to self-released, to Atlantic Records.
But, above all, this album is a sign of disrespect towards and disdain for Foster’s longtime fans.
I can guarantee Foster is laughing at the back of an LA nightclub somewhere. He must be equal parts incredulous and self-satisfied with the gullibility of his fanatics, who are painting this album online as the band’s magnum opus, while nothing could be further from the truth.
It’s an offensive lie that undermines the band’s true zenith: their 2014 album Supermodel.
Now, Foster’s audacity to release this material (much of which should have been left on the cutting-room floor) could well point to a god complex, if not evince Foster’s prominence in LA creatives’ echo chambers.
However, it could also be a case of Foster’s ideological bent coming full circle. His greatest triumph, if you will. A chance to finally demonstrate the ills of consumerism through his work praxis:
No matter what garbage he releases, no matter how purposely devoid of artistry almost to the point of satire…
…His small but passionate cult of personality will eat it up.
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About Jonathan Cuch
Thank you for expressing so eloquently how I feel about this album.
A simple Google search shows you that the pronunciation of “kaleidoscopic” is /k??l??d??sk?p?k/, just as Foster does so in the opening track. This little mistake stood out to me, and suddenly the entire post unravelled before my eyes. There’s a certain irony in publishing an opinion piece accusing an artist of being arrogantly self-righteous, while lacking the self-awareness to hold yourself to your own standards.
Im guessing Cubbie paid you to write this
As an outsider looking in, I’m guessing there is a bit more to this story. Only a guess though.
Whoa… we’ve left from criticism to the type of drunken vitriol a spurned lover might vent here. “I can guarantee Foster is laughing at the back of an LA nightclub somewhere.” You can? Post the photos.
Did Cubbie pay you?
If so… who’s Cubbie?
I’ll be listening to this album tonight. Sounds great.
I know mark foster pretty well. He started off a pretty cool guy. Genuine. He really wanted to make music and had talent. As the years have gone on, he has descended into a kind of sad quiet “hills of Los Angeles” existence. I’m sure he ends up at parties with lots of actors and such in Hollywood.. I’ve been to those parties, over and over . It’s a cocktail party that never really ends. It’s people who managed to make themselves a brand, and often they can live off it, until they become old and bejeweled, and die off into nothingness. I had high hopes for Mark. I could show you some amazing emails and text messages from before he fell into the darkness. I think he’s a person who desires to be deep, but is actually pretty shallow. it’s too bad because he was so close to being “cool”. To being someone on earth who wanted to “foster the people”.. you know. contribute. And then money, and the allure of the LA lifestyle, just sucked him in. It was absolutely horribly watching them roll out this album over the summer. No Tik Tok account, no social media. Then clearly, nobody was interested, and somebody at Atlantic was like “Hey guys. You need to try please, that’s what we’re paying you for”. And then they started putting out these half-ass studio tik toks and things, clearly at the behest of management and label. The TT account sits at 25K users, for a band once so big, that’s a joke. I hate to be mean about it, but this a person who had the opportunity to do so much good and squandered it. I know Isom too, he just wants to work. It’s too bad he’s locked into this situation where is best possiblity is through this quietly narcissistic , shallow person. I’ll leave it with this. I looked dup album reviews just now because I had a dream about Mark last night. I was somewhere.. like along a river. And I had something I was supposed to give him. it was a golden tie, some sort of award or something. And I was supposed to meet him and give it to him. But I didn’t really want to. I just wanted to leave it and let him find it. But I’m too conscientious for that kind of thing. So I sat at a table with the tie, and he never showed. For some reason I moved to another place, further down this riverside, and sat there. And then he showed up. He sat down. He didn’t speak to me. I had left the tie/award elsewhere. And finally I said ..”what’s up mark.. what’s going on?” and he didn’t speak. or even look at me. . he just got up and walked away. I think he walked away from his joy a long time ago. Now the band is just out of some minor allegiance to Issom, and so his wife and Hollywood friends have something to ask him about. I find it all really sad.