Dent May - Across the Multiverse
(2017 Carpark)
1 May also inexplicably won "Best New Band" that year at China's Huading Awards. The only other international laureates of Huading Awards that year for anything other than film were Adam Lambert and Carly Rae Jepsen. The title of "Best New Band" has yet to be handed out again.↩
(2017 Carpark)
It's been 4 years since I caught Dent May's set at the now-defunct Boomslang festival, hosted by the University of Kentucky's campus radio station WRFL. I'd only recognized the singer-songwriter's name from the back catalogue of Animal Collective's (also extinct) record label, Paw Tracks, but I trusted the judgement of the imprint's founders enough to give the guy a shot.
The eighty-or-so attendees and I -- heads still swimming in residual reverb from performances by Fielded and Idiot Glee -- spilled out onto the balding lawn of Al's Bar in time to see May, dressed in a floral button-down and John Lennon shades, wander onto the stage flanked by his three-piece backing band. The music that followed them seemed to flow from some hidden source behind the platform: impossibly complex and otherworldly. Aqueous keys trickled through a funk-rock sieve as the frontman paced the stage like an active sleepwalker, climbing to the top of stacked amps as he waxed Brian Wilson about rent money and party dresses. The spirit of chillwave, ready to ascend into the subgenre afterlife, was housed in that lawn -- it was a sermon of the mount, the mount in question taking the form of a pillar of amplification equipment. Unsuspecting passersby broke out into dance. I'm not the biggest live music fan, but I can say with certainty that what I experienced was just a hair short of magical -- I still think about it to this day.
And as soon as the presence was with us, it was gone. All that was left was the humidity on the back of my neck. That, and the copy of his then-latest LP, Warm Blanket, which I snagged from CD Central before heading home. It had its transcendent hooks and its haunting Beach Boys melodies -- it worked its way into car-trip rotation and became one of my favorite records of the year 1. It still never quite lived up to what I took in that summer Saturday though. Warm Blanket lived up to its title, not to the tropical climate he brought with him to the stage.
Evident in the design of his new album's sleeve, which happens to be the work of Boomslang poster painter and Kesha cover artist Robert Beatty, May's attempting to recapture the palm tree sway of his live sound, or at least to hearken back to the hardbound surfaces of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks.
Across the Multiverse at times comes close to doing so: it's a mixed bag of decent, yet too-familiar tunecraft and some very high points. The record's title track, a collaboration with Frankie Cosmos(!), is its loftiest offering. The pair distantly mutter their lines into italo-funk arrangements, pausing to let strings and horns rattle off a few dreamy phrases. The song's squelchy little synth solo taken into consideration, it's the sort of track that'd sit nicely in a Katamari OST: upbeat, esoteric, and twee.
"Take Me To Heaven" is pretty tight, too. With its stuttering piano chords and falsetto vocals, I can't help but think that it's an attempt at writing an Elton John song with gratuitous synthesizer slathered on top. Weird stuff, but it works.
Though I respect that it samples the screech of a dial-up modem, I can't really get into "Picture on a Screen": the concepts of transhuman love and uncanny valley are starting to feel played-out, especially when Wild Nothing's done it better in a similar style on "TV Girl". May feels more at home stretched across the heavens of the physical realm, looking at the breadth of the Earth from above on "I'm Gonna Live Forever Until I'm Dead" or declaring love for celestial spheres on "Distance to the Moon".
May's lyrically always reaching for a cosmic largeness that's always beyond his reach, just like I feel looking back on the improbable beauty of the 2013 setlist. Until time-travel or interplanetary transport are feasible, this record will do for each of us. It's pretty and idealistic -- simple and wide-eyed -- lovely and worth your time.
Evident in the design of his new album's sleeve, which happens to be the work of Boomslang poster painter and Kesha cover artist Robert Beatty, May's attempting to recapture the palm tree sway of his live sound, or at least to hearken back to the hardbound surfaces of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks.
Definitely some stylistic resemblance here.
Across the Multiverse at times comes close to doing so: it's a mixed bag of decent, yet too-familiar tunecraft and some very high points. The record's title track, a collaboration with Frankie Cosmos(!), is its loftiest offering. The pair distantly mutter their lines into italo-funk arrangements, pausing to let strings and horns rattle off a few dreamy phrases. The song's squelchy little synth solo taken into consideration, it's the sort of track that'd sit nicely in a Katamari OST: upbeat, esoteric, and twee.
"Take Me To Heaven" is pretty tight, too. With its stuttering piano chords and falsetto vocals, I can't help but think that it's an attempt at writing an Elton John song with gratuitous synthesizer slathered on top. Weird stuff, but it works.
Though I respect that it samples the screech of a dial-up modem, I can't really get into "Picture on a Screen": the concepts of transhuman love and uncanny valley are starting to feel played-out, especially when Wild Nothing's done it better in a similar style on "TV Girl". May feels more at home stretched across the heavens of the physical realm, looking at the breadth of the Earth from above on "I'm Gonna Live Forever Until I'm Dead" or declaring love for celestial spheres on "Distance to the Moon".
May's lyrically always reaching for a cosmic largeness that's always beyond his reach, just like I feel looking back on the improbable beauty of the 2013 setlist. Until time-travel or interplanetary transport are feasible, this record will do for each of us. It's pretty and idealistic -- simple and wide-eyed -- lovely and worth your time.
Kei Toriki - Childhood Memories EP
(2016 Otherman Records)
Though it lacks vocals and traditional song structures, it could be argued that Kei Toriki's 2016 Childhood Memories EP contains atmospheric/idealistic cues comparable to Dent May's. Simulating wonky math-rock rhythms with sampled drumbreaks, the guitarist plucks his way to cinematic heights, aided by wails of chiptune synth. Smash all these elements together, and you've got the hyper-melodicism of Anamanaguchi married to Explosions in the Sky's somber tunefulness. Childhood Memories hustles its way to stone-faced nostalgia, tossing in some headbop-inducing percussion and catchy riffs along the way.
Texturally, intro track "Blue" is my favorite offering here. It leans more Toriki's post-rock tendencies than his affinity for ambient IDM, delicately weaving electric leads into looped, glistening chords. "Muqaevi_Oqulivi" takes the top spot overall, though. It's laced together with staccato jazz solo and filled out by some suprisingly tasteful future-bass backing.
On the B-side, Umio's remix of title track "Childhood Memories" is a memorable showing. A high-school music classroom's worth of backing adds timbral depth to Toriki's work: a metronome and xylophone lead seamlessly into a farty hardcore drum-and-bass groove before the composition comes up for air. Piano enters the fray, then bassy swells of brass, and, finally, some strings and the aforementioned malletted percussion.
Though the remixes make for fun playlist-fodder, the meat of the EP is a legitimately cool conceptual experience taken as a whole. It's great stuff to listen to while playing video games, if you're the type of person that prefers to provide their own soundtrack to a title. Download here.
