The tension between delicacy and toughness is in many ways the album’s defining feature. Her technique ensures that the album consistently feels dynamic. Moore skillfully and subtly modulates her voice between soft, delicate coos and forceful, smokier growls, as on the melancholy opener, “In the Morning I’ll Be Better”. The songwriting includes enough bite and introspection to balance out the band’s easy, relaxed sound, allowing enough clouds to roll in to keep things interesting. Listening to the record, one can easily imagine how it might have been crafted amidst salty winds and hazy sunshine, but neither does it feel like an album simply about a vacation. Fortunately, the songs themselves are content to reduce the autobiographical elements to mere footnotes, standing entirely on their own. And indeed, if Tennis’s latest effort relied on the story of its nautical conception to be compelling, this would be a fair complaint. You can’t pull the same cutesy gimmick to sell two different albums, one might say. If Yours Conditionally wasn’t packed with such tightly constructed, compelling pop songs, this could all be a bit infuriating. They composed about half of the new record prior to their voyage, and the other half at sea. The purpose of the excursion was to mine their creativity and “revisit our past to salvage the present”, as Moore writes in a press release. Now, in preparation for Yours Conditionally, Moore and Riley yet again embarked on an aquatic journey, this time to the Sea of Cortez. We first became acquainted with Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley on 2011’s Cape Dory, which chronicled the pair’s seven-month voyage aboard a sailboat. The band has a signature style that is either cloyingly cute or refreshingly summery depending on the listener. By now, most have probably already formed an opinion of husband-and-wife duo Tennis and their light, sunny brand of indie pop.
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