The Sound of Not Turning Around

There’s a specific kind of afternoon that She & Him belongs to—overcast, nothing on the schedule, the kind of quiet that feels like it costs something. Don’t Look Back fits there perfectly. Zooey Deschanel has one of those voices that sounds like it’s been played back slightly too slow, just warm enough to feel lived-in, and M. Ward builds his guitar arrangements around it with a taste that makes you forget he’s doing anything at all. Which is almost the hardest thing to pull off.

The whole She & Him project lives in that space between nostalgia and something more deliberately crafted. You can hear Phil Spector and Carole King in there, a 1960s pop sensibility filtered through two people who clearly know exactly what they’re doing. Don’t Look Back has that same carefully calibrated casualness—effortless in a way that takes real effort. The tempo is unhurried. The melody sticks without announcing itself.

I keep coming back to Deschanel’s phrasing. She doesn’t push anything. There’s no big moment where she opens up and shows you what she can do. It’s all in the restraint, the way she sits just slightly behind the beat on certain phrases. It shouldn’t work as well as it does. It really, stubbornly does.