Pop Music to keep you on your toes.  The second album from Amsterdam outfit Personal Trainer gives a glimpse of what The Velvet Underground would have been doing if they’d made it to 2024.

Release Date:  2^nd August 2024

Label: Bella Union

Formats: CD / Vinyl / Digital

PERSONAL TRAINER

Personal Trainer is, essentially, the personal project of Amsterdam vocalist/songwriter Willem Smit and Still Willing is the second alum under the project’s name – it’s the follow-up to their 2022 debut, Big love Blanket.  Willem’s mission, this time around, was to produce “…a multi-facetted album of shining contrasts and spry melodies, bursting arrangements and subliminal sounds, playful lyrics and self-reflection: in short, a pop album executed with dynamism, vim and charm.”  So: is that what’s been accomplished?  Not half, I’d say.  Still Willing is the best thing I’ve heard for quite some time and – this is the best bit – the longer I listened, the more I loved it.

Willem has consolidated the lineup of Personal Trainer in recent months and the core band featured on Still Willing – Willem on vocals, Kilian Kayser on percussion, Leon Harms on drums, Mart Boumans on guitar and sax, Franti Maresova on guitars, Ruben van Weeberg on bass and Abel Tuinstra on keys and synths is, essentially, the Personal Trainer touring band.  Here, the core band is supplemented, with some amazing contributions from Dutch alt-pop vocalist Lena Hessels, saxophonist Nick Bolland and three members of Dutch alt-pop quintet, The Klittens.

FUELLED BY EXTREMES

Describing Still Willing, Willem says: “This is a record fuelled by its extremes: sometimes energetic and loud, sometimes quiet and thoughtful, always full of hidden pleasures.  When I listen to the records I make, the main thing I hope is that every time something happens on them, you’re like, ‘Wow.’  I like to be taken by surprise like that on a record, to kind of be thrown around.”  Well – there’s certainly no shortage of surprises on Still Willing. I can’t think of a better description for the emotions I experienced as I listened than “thrown around.”  In fact, I can’t help feeling that if The Velvet Underground had made it to 2024, they’d be springing exactly the same kinds of surprises on us.

Opening track, Upper Ferntree Gully ,is an acknowledgement of the Australian birthplace of Willem’s mother. If you listen closely enough to the widescreen, orchestral, synthesized opening, you’ll pick up strains of mother’s recorded voice, deep in the mix – and it sure does add something special to the warmth and sentimentality of the soundscape.  As a portent of the surprises in store, the dreamy synths melt into tight, riffy, heavy rock and the overall impression is of a piece that blends Kraftwerk with OMD and Slipknot.  We were promised surprises, and this, it seems, is what surprises sound like…

SUMMERY & UNPREDICTABLE

In complete contrast, the delightful I Can Be Your Personal Trainer is a slice of late-60s-flavoured pastoral pop, with a tune and surreal lyrics (“Hit me with your dinner table”) that put me in mind of The Bonzos, or, more currently, At The Barrier’s favourite fop-poppers, Barbara.  And, described as “A weird, happy, pop track,” Cyan is another album highlight.  Lena Hessels’ backing vocals are superb, and Nick Bollands’ sax hits the spot, too.  Speaking of the track, Willem said: “With most of this one, I was trying to make myself laugh, or at least smile.  Somewhere along the process, I found something like honesty or something beautiful in it.”  I agree: Cyan is dreamy, summery, unpredictable, leftfield pop at its very best.

The joyful Round mixes full-force rock with hilarious lyrics. Lyrics that are delivered in a style that mixes Lou Reed with Jilted John, before Willem springs another surprise with the folky New Bad Feeling.  At least, it’s folky at first, before a spot of riffing introduces a shuffling, rock and roll coda and – you know what – all the parts mesh together beautifully.

IS IT PUNK? IS IT FUNK?

Perhaps the most unclassifiable track on the album is the majestic – and appropriately-titled – Intangible.  Is it punk?  Is it funk?  Electronic gunk?  Who cares: the guitars are spiky, the bass is resonant and the drums are crisp and tight.  It’s fast, free and fantastic.  Perhaps its composite structure is a result of the song’s unconventional Genesis, which Willem describes: “I tried to make a song that is something I wouldn’t normally do and experiment with that.  I like how it turned out because it’s also probably one of the first instances where I had the chorus first and the other parts later, which rarely happens.”  Well, no matter how it all came about, it worked. 

There’s also a bit of everything in the surprise-laden Testing the Alarm. Spacy synth themes, jangly guitars, heavy metal riffage and even a spot of tango all find their place. The parts fit together like a jigsaw; and that’s before we even consider Willem’s lyrical wordplay. It reaches its zenith in the infinity-mirror coda, as he observes: “The reflection of my eyes, in the reflection of your eyes, in the reflection of my eyes, in the reflections of your eyes….” Etc, etc.

A GLORIOUS DIN

The album’s discordantly funky title track has nothing to do with Lowell George and Little Feat. In fact, it’s probably the album’s most faithful projection of the work of Lou Reed and the Velvets.  It’s another of the album’s standout tracks – a 2:41 chunk of alt-pop that you’ll want to hear over and over.  The punky You Better Start Scrubbing is, apparently, a Personal Trainer live-show favourite, and I can understand why.  Deep, rumbling synths give way to a lo-fi punk cacophony that sounds, for all the world, like a refugee from 1981. Guest vocals from ⅗ of The Klittens add to the glorious din.

Still Willing is one of those albums that exits in much the same way that it entered. In this case, with a surge of orchestral synths, that provide the tight, sparse, backing to Willem’s observational lyrics.  Of course, the heavy riffs are here too – we still need our surprises – but the focus, as the album reaches its conclusion, is upon Willem’s contemplations on how, exactly, he fits in with everyone else: “What am I supposed to do about the people and their ways?”

Willem Smit is clearly quite a guy, and Still Willing is definitely quite some album.  This one’s a good ‘un. The more you listen, the more you’ll love it.

Watch the official video to Round, a track from the new Personal Trainer album, here:

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