REVIEW: last chance to see – salvia palth

The man behind “i was all over her” exceeds expectations with his surprise new record.

Remember when “i was all over her” was actually fucking inescapable back in the early 2020s? It was “all over” TikTok, raved about by baby gays with fluffy blue mullets and nerdy “male manipulator” types alike. Its dreamy production and teen angst seemed to have widespread appeal.

Before its resurgence in the TikTok music era of the 2020s, New Zealander Daniel Johann Lines’s project salvia palth was a staple of the 2010s lo-fi bedroom scene on Bandcamp. Released in 2013, Melanchole (featuring the aforementioned hit “i was all over her”) was recorded by Lines when he was just fifteen years old, and it’s accordingly messy and dripping with the same teen angst we’ve all heard before. I mean, I can’t really talk — when I was fifteen, my body of work consisted of anime fanart and Minecraft houses. But melanchole remains uncompelling, its slapdash production and flat vocals somewhat charming at the beginning but later tiresome. 

But on his first album under salvia palth in eleven years, last chance to see, Lines proves himself to be more than the teenage hype of melanchole and “i was all over her.” Where that earlier work that put him on the map was clearly indebted to his older contemporaries on Bandcamp (most obviously Teen Suicide/Sam Ray), last chance to see draws from a much more diverse pool of influences and genres. In a recent interview with Stereogum, Lines praised 90s shoegaze, taking inspiration from Kevin Shields’s (My Bloody Valentine) blending of influences: “I don’t want to hear anything that directly calls back to [the originals]; I want to hear the idiosyncratic blend of all the greats’ influences. That’s what Shields was doing, pulling together really different things, and I want to do that myself.”

And that Lines does. Last chance to see brings to mind a number of different artists — some in the alternative canon, others up-and-coming — all while Lines finds his own unique sound, especially in his much-improved vocals. The neo-psychedelic twang of the reverb-drenched guitars in “something i had said” and “you wouldn’t ask a fire to stop” are reminiscent of SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE’s Hypnic Jerks (2018), and the hazy dream pop-tinged indie folk of “stabbed in the small of the back” and “still i struggle” takes obvious (and remarkably effective) cues from Alex G, a fellow Millennial/Gen Z cusper Bandcamp veteran. 

Last chance to see succeeds primarily on its eclecticism, but it also maintains a consistent atmosphere throughout, and that atmosphere is one that is far more mature than melanchole (which is to be expected — he was fifteen then, after all). Last chance to see captures the melancholic newness and strangeness of growing up, of being a young adult. It takes the growing pains of melanchole and translates them into something more finished. “Best friend on the cross” tackles the dilemma of standing by a friend whose behavior is destructive in some way, to themselves or otherwise; “always freaking out” struggles with the disappointment of a seeming lack of improvement in the narrator’s anxiety since he was younger;  the title track grieves the loss of the ephemeral, and the regret that comes with not appreciating it enough while it was there. Last chance to see is a substantial elegy for the shallower angst of teenagehood, and it’s hopefully a sign that Lines’s comeback won’t be short-lived.