Review: DJ Lucas - "Lucas' Mansion III"

DJ Lucas - Lucas' Mansion III

(2017 Dark World)

Weighing in at a beefy 22 songs, the latest project by Massachusetts native Lucas Kendall finds the rapper/producer oddly wedged in the crevice between laissez-faire Soundcloud experimentation and the inventive, Garageband-sourced sound that's landed him production credits for arthouse emcees like Wiki, Antwon, and even the wildly prolific CHXPO. 

When we last saw Lucas in late July, he'd turned in Unleash These Bangers, Too, his most polished and accessible effort to date. Outsourcing much of its production to fellow New England beat-makers, he paired his conversational storytelling and ear for dissonant, autotuned melodies with an incredibly diverse array of timbres. On "Arm/Leg," he reflected on his rural "farm kid" roots to the bounce of west-coast percussion. He was an emo R&B singer on "1 Phone Call Away," and a malfunctioning robot spitting over wonky Wii Sports jazz arrangements on "In My Element."

Sacrificing a bit of his populist appeal, Lucas takes almost total control behind the boards on LMIII, approaching sound design with his signature genre-twisting, iconoclastic attitude while dipping deeper into autobiographical waters than he has in the past. Early single "New Gear" laces a funky bassline with trills of slide guitar, imbuing the beat with a weird folk-rock flavor without delving into the gimmicky country-rap aesthetic one might have imagined based on my description alone. Lucas' blends of sounds don't often sound great on paper, but in practice they just work because they're true to his experience. The arrangements here are hazy and nostalgic: the perfect complement to Lucas' memories of basketball practices, summers spent growing up around UMass' campus, and his love for the local scene of weirdo-rappers he's held together as Dark World Records' unofficial figurehead. 

The record's most impressive cuts find Lucas playing the role of an indie rock songwriter, taking after his father, who fronted a few jangle-pop outfits in the 80s and 90s. While contemporaries like Lil Peep and Mackned are content to exclusively cull their samples from midwestern emo records, Lucas' production feels more akin to The Strokes' wiry guitar-pop. Despite its 808s and tinny hi-hats "One More Day" is a sundae-sweet love song that swells with hammond organ samples and malt-shop sentimentality. It's another track that's bizarre in theory, but plays out naturally: even as his voice warbles against wavering pitch-correction software, Lucas effortlessly draws an ooze of melancholia from his breezy chord progression, and the lyrics are just simple enough not to sound forced. It's far from his most technically proficient work, but it stands out as a truly unique composite of musical styles. 

Even the classic Lucas ethos sounds fresh on LMIII. Free-jazz tune "Pretty Please" feels like a collage of quips cut from text messages, some of them too personal or esoteric to understand, others hitting home on a lovable, down-to-earth level. It's the sort of cut that makes you feel like you've been close friends with the artist for years -- die-hard Dark World fans will be all-too familiar with Lucas' desire to be a small-town hero, his baseball references, and his off-hand allusions to unexplained events from his past that we're not meant to know about. There's always some suble/mundane/charming aspect of his character to excavate from the lyrics: it's the kind of songwriting Genius.com was founded for.

Lucas' Mansion III is currently my second-favorite installment in the DJ Lucas canon, but it's primed to take the top spot soon. It's an effort meant to grow on the listener, concealing subtly brilliant lines and hooks that take patience to get into the groove of. Even if the consistency of the songs can be a little off sometimes, it's tough to get bored bumping his music: he's always tinkering with new sounds and packing them with honest, intelligent lyrical content.

Review: ruru - "SLEEP"

ruru - SLEEP

(2017 Self-Released)

Here's the sound of the near-future zeitgeist: a year-and-a-half removed from Chance the Rapper's Coloring Book and five years deep into Mac Demarco's pop-cultural ascent, the time is just about ripe for us to appreciate a re-imagining of jazzy R'n'B this solidly inventive, sophisticated, and fun. 

Following up her debut Sounds of the Mundane EP, which reveled in the warmth of Northwestern twee-folk acts like Lois and The Softies, Filipino singer-songwriter ruru drapes her once-sparse arrangements in a musty thrift-store jacket. There's a whiff of jazz-inflected nostalgia in SLEEP's sherpa lining, but what's it nostalgic for? The taut grooves and woozy twang of Al Green's more downbeat cuts? The homey folk that phases into the background as night falls on your Animal Crossing town? Hall and Oates? 

Maybe nostalgia's not even the right word for it: the term entails a sadness and longing for something unrecoverable that I and my fellow post-Millennials aren't used to: we can conjure pictures of an old Happy Meal Toy or an episode of a favorite TV show at a moment's notice, no matter when it may have been released. The historical place of a pop-cultural artifact dissolves into the pool of our close ancestors' existence, leading us to create artistic works that can cull influence from twenty or thirty years of creativity. To us, that amount of time doesn't even seem that long. If it's documented, we can access it.

So SLEEP emerges from that sense of ambiguity. It caulks the little crannies that exist between decades, like the earthy color pallets of the late seventies to early eighties and the Reagan era's new-wavey spillage into George H.W. Bush's presidency. ruru takes their most interesting aesthetic elements, slips them into a glass slide, and then places them beneath the lo-fi lens of a twee-pop microscope. Each of the record's seven tracks is a cute little prokaryote, flagellating to its own funky rhythm.

If SLEEP were a sandwich, its bread would be the best part. Opener "when you're away" and closer "lil lonely" are slices of that expensive sprouted-wheat bread from the supermarket: Tempurpedic-soft, texturally-engaging, and maybe a little sweet/beery from sitting on the kitchen counter for too long. The former is the record's lowest-fi affair, spreading gummy keyboard chords on a cracker-thin drum loop. ruru sets up a lyrical diorama of an overcast day: gloomy cottonball clouds hang from thread tendrils above suburban milk cartons. "I'm a pathetic eclectic," she sings, sounding vaguely similar to Crying's Elaiza Santos. "Tell me what you're up to today." The latter's a jazz-pop dream, rattling off wah-pedaled Rhodes piano melodies that could fit nicely into a Father beat while leaving space for ruru to imagine a "Teletubby October", doused in reverb. 

In between the slices, the quick cut "seventeen" stands out, sliding nimble maj7 chords into a jaunty rhythm like a Belle and Sebastian record played too fast. "sepanx" is also worth a listen, if not just for its fantastically spaced-out guitar noodling.

Smashing just about every sonic concept that's cool (or is about to be cool) into one digestible record, ruru's SLEEP is the sound of the moment but looks beyond it too. It's definitely a year-end list contender for me, and I doubt it's the last project I'll hear from her. Bump this record before ruru's impending cult following convinces you to do so. 

Review: Earth Boy - "My Sword Was My Devotion"

Earth Boy - My Sword Was My Devotion

(2017 Self-Released)

Earth Boy shares a name with one of the standout tracks on DIIV's debut LP, Oshin, only it bears a space dividing Zachary Cole Smith's original titular portmanteau. Though the two projects share a penchant for staccato guitar riffs and exorbitant amounts of reverb, it's that all-too-important space between "Earth" and "Boy" that separates their sounds. Despite watery mixing techniques and sleeptalk vocals, DIIV's songcraft stands firmly entrenched in post-punk grime, stomping divots into loamy bass as it charges forth in a permanent beeline towards nowhere in particular. It strives for kinetic beauty, inherently present in motion, dissolving as quickly as the band stops to catch its breath. DIIV's boy and its earth are in constant contact, even if they're not aware of each other.

Earth Boy's relation to the planet is more peripheral -- the Washingtonian singer-songwriter floats in the exosphere, surveying the terrain below and doing his best to translate the blurred topography to sound. Guitars, keyboards, and creaky drum machine loops each occupy their own niche in the space between artist and globe, orbiting loose rhythms like a ramshackle solar system. The best tracks on his latest EP, My Sword Was My Devotion, accentuate that disjointed atmosphere, eschewing lo-fi genre conventions to create chilly soundscapes that feel like cold fall days. "I'm Sorry I Misunderstood" sounds like a late-90s Aphex Twin track covered on toy instruments: sampled snare breaks scramble into position while sleepy keyboard chords rise from their sleep, stretch, and yawn across multiple bars, woken up by churchbells in the distance.

"Untitled" acts like an extended bridge in the center of a larger, unheard song: it gives the listener a peek at scrapped grandiosity while sticking to the cozy smallness that makes My Sword so charming. Here, a sluggish guitar refrain navigates undulating waves of bedroom pop fuzz, proceeding slowly on a limp. It's tempting to make comparisons to Pavement, but I'm most reminded of Yuck -- especially their brief period fronted by Daniel Blumberg. Earth Boy's falsetto sounds like a faraway cry for help and a whisper in your ear at the same time, and the lyrics are just as emotionally ambiguous: "I don't want to go out / I want to stay inside my house / without you I don't know if I'll be alright".

Maybe it's even possible to make comparisons to Earl Sweatshirt's last LP. Both Earth Boy and Sweatshirt revel in their hermetical lifestyles, nestled in a protective layer of tape hiss. And both keep their songs brief, frugal with the syllables and heavy on emotion. My Sword clocks in at just 6 minutes, but it doesn't skimp on the impact. It's an innovative effort that's texturally brittle but packs a punch.

Reviews: Dent May / Kei Toriki

Dent May - Across the Multiverse
(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.

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.

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.^↩

Review: ОРУЖИЕ - "Quiet Facts about Angels"

ОРУЖИЕ - Quiet Facts About Angels
(2017 velcroheadrecords)

"No real modus operandi," reads velcroheadrecords' mission statement. "No hope, no refinement. Record it live and put it out on tape." 

There's urgency embedded in the Montreal-based imprint's creative process, but the finished product's anything but hasty. Composed entirely of improvised jams, the debut full-length tape by label founder ОРУЖИЕ (Russian for "weapons") is a meditative -- sometimes mindstate-altering -- effort that acts as a translucent eggshell, clouding our view of some violent chemical activity taking place within.

Maybe it's more effective to think of it as an old TV monitor's screen, sending pinpricks of static through your fingers as you press them against the glass, protecting observers from the greyscale horror beamed by its cathode ray tube. Distant enough from the camera to appear small, the foggy outline of a human form moves from pinky to middle finger, ducking beneath your palm and then slowly peeking through the empty curve between the thumb and forefinger. Its face is like smoke -- a mass of billowing darkness against the floral wallpaper of the living room it inhabits.

Quiet Facts about Angels resides in a middle ground between David Lynch's sputtering The Big Dream and the often-atonal drum machine grooves that John Carpenter composed for Assault on Precinct 13. That's to say that despite its minimal atmosphere, throttled by lo-fi crunch, the record is downright cinematic in scope. Since much of the music here seems to have been made on the fly, the songs on Quiet Facts are structureless, gathering grime and abstract narrative as they hustle forth at approximately 120 to 130 beats per minute. Layers are laid down and shaved off one at a time, flirting with climactic releases of tension but never reaching them.

The top half of ОРУЖИЕ's playlist is loaded with gritty low-end thump that all but drowns out the clattering rhythms that bloom from it. "hornets" sways side to side on its crushingly-dense trunk of growling synth, leaving just enough space for glistening pads and a post-punk guitar riff to push through the surface -- it's all pretty reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle, though maybe more danceable (in theory). It's followed by a welcome intermission in the form of "autumn (diary ii)" before "batteries (1.1)" usurps the soundscape. The cut girds its four-on-the-floor kick with syncopated lashes of steely snare while standard house hi-hats keep the rhythm regular. Dissonant bell-chimes ring in the distance, indicating an off-screen ritual held in some post-apocalyptic wasteland that formed mid-Industrial Revolution. Though it appears early on, this 3-track sequence is the heart of the album, showcases its full array of textures and moods.

"saturn 1.01.0" ushers in the tape's more traditionally pretty second half. Phase-shifted synths trickle down sheets of nearly-lifeless horn samples. Save for slap-bass, the beat's fairly hollow, staring at the listener stone-faced, yet picturesque. It's the most upbeat song on the tape, but it's tinged with a sense of defeat, sprawled out on a couch and covered in sweat as it catches a much-needed nap after a hard day's work. "In Dust" is a solid ambient closer, undulating sultrily as a Badalamenti score while taking on the corroded quality of a silent film's score.

Instrumentally, Quiet Facts is a huge step into new territory for the former frontman of early Bandcamp emo duo Jackie Trash, but aesthetically, it's not. Just like any Linus Taylor project, ОРУЖИЕ finds a delicate balance between hushed beauty and rowdy dissonance, making for an effort that's sometime's sleepy, sometimes unbearably aggressive, but always engagingly weird. 

Single Reviews: chocofriendz / i-fls

chocofriendz - "goodbye"

(2017 Self-Released)

Today's doubleheader review catches up with two artists who are no strangers to this blog. Though they may hail from opposing lateral hemispheres of the globe, chocofriendz and i-fls are equally cloaked in digital mystery, coating their instrumentals in emotional longing, woozy synths, and the .jpeg artifacts of DeviantArt illustrations long-forgotten. 

The alphabetical former of the pair, chocofriendz turns in his most texturally enticing effort yet in the form of "goodbye", a track that culls back the New England bedroom popster's ambient keyboard pads in favor of acoustic guitar and fluttering melodica. In 2016, I imagined choco's oddly capitalized hi ANGEL LP as a dream set in a suburban simulacrum. Sustained chords stood still as mown grass collected dew overnight. Lyrical references to cartoon characters and heroes of children's literature loomed like ping-pong ball eyes, peeking out from inside a shadowy shrub as if to assert their magical-realist presence in the dreamer's mind. It wasn't the cool on the other side of the pillow. It was the placidity flowing through the down -- the threadcount -- and transferring into your skull via osmosis. 

Choco's new stuff isn't as philosophically complex as what's in his back catalog, but it doesn't need to be. On "goodbye", the composition speaks for itself. The notes land with more grit than they used to, plucked steel strings flopping against snares and errant keys. This track's the swamp behind the woods that surround hi ANGEL's suburbs. Here, what seem to be modular synths suck sloppily against the mud like shoes with extra grip. They croak like frogs in urgent need for flies. Choco is frugally cosplaying as Animal Collective circa Hollinndagain, muffling the harsher edges with quilted fabrics. He roughs it, setting up his blanket fort on your living room carpet, inviting you beneath the lean-to to roast riffs over a tin-can flame. You don't need an eclipse or cliffside view to get in touch with nature, you learn. You can let nature into your home -- let it ransack your fridge and crash on the futon. Flick the light and wish the track good night. It's too subtle to take in all at once -- this is the kind of work you need to sleep on, only to wake to an epiphany.

i-fls - no start point / earphone song

(2017 Self-Released)

Japanese producer i-fls dabbles in more polished textures than those that Choco employs, but his latest single release titled no start point / earphone song proves that the unlikely duo draw from the same wellspring of sentiment. Following the release of the project's twentieth album(!), the three-song record delivers a visual and aural aesthetic that i-fls fans will find familiar, but always welcome: layers of filmy Garageband synths creep across the surface of shuffling house rhythms, crisp and capacious as the blue photos that frame each cover artwork but raw as the ballpoint doodles pasted onto them.

Bonus cut "earphone song" is the strongest showing here. It's the most moderately-paced of the bunch, bouncing on quiet kicks and claves as a melody slowly-but-steadily finds footing while navigating the beat. Imagine ascending a shopping mall's massive escalator -- no top floor in sight -- surrounded by glass walls on either side. It's snowing, but the flakes melt against the ground, and somehow despite precipitation there's not a cloud in the sky. The atmosphere just erupts with flakes that dot the surface like cotton nubbles in a baby blue sweater. And outside the mall with plastic bags hanging from your forearm you absentmindedly twist the knit lumps in your pullover.

And your cheeks are red and cold.

Review: i-fls - "wasted"

i-fls - wasted
(2017 Self-Released)

Whatever i-fls has wasted, it's not time. By my own count, wasted is the twentieth album released by the Japanese solo outfit over the course of the past half-decade. That sort of rapid-fire output can be understandably daunting for first-time listeners -- awash in dreamy shades of blue and strewn with nearly-identical sketches of the project's stoic avatar, i-fls' Bandcamp page doesn't exactly lay out a welcome mat, signifying a proper entry into its body of work. It instead feels more akin to picking the lock of a virtual filing cabinet, only to discover a row of manila envelopes organizing a corporation's annual reports. Marked with identical Helvetica letterheads, each stapled document tells the story of year in its own language. Anyone can mull over statistics, but it takes an accountant's eye to arrange them into a narrative.

Like a connoisseur of Grateful Dead bootlegs or Guided by Voices records, I sift through i-fls' cabinet of files with an auditor's scrutiny. Though their tracks come uniformly clad in a haze of Garageband synths and faint percussion, it's the sense of familiarity I have with the project's music that helps me appreciate the subtlety in each new release. 

wasted, for example, is i-fls' most goth effort to date. Often melodies are more implied than performed, taking the form of the sugar-glazed shoegazery that might frost a Slowdive tune or a late-80s Cocteau Twins endeavor. Early standout "useless places" grooves alongside a sweeping three-note hook that wouldn't feel out of place woven into The Cure's Disintegration. Trashed snare drums and clattering hi-hats tame the gelatinous synth arrangements, keeping them stable enough for your mind to bounce on.

"kinako 2 b" makes a rare use of acoustic guitar, which plucks out a few clumsy riffs before dissolving into the usual i-fls recipe: throbbing keyboard pads, a minimal house groove, and wintry chimes. The raw buzz of steel strings is jarring against the album's fuzzy, subdued tones. Though only lasting for about 10 seconds, it's perhaps wasted's most memorable moment.

These moments of oddity concealed beneath a cloak of J-Pop ambience are what keep me coming back to i-fls' discography time and time again. That's not to say that their traditional tracks aren't worth checking out, though. "soutarou" fleshes out its five-minute span with PC Music percussion that forms carbonation bubbles on the surface of tangy synth stabs. Closer "like you" reaffirms the project's core strengths, lacing reverby drum hit into chillwave eyelets.

wasted is yet another solid addition to an extensive back catalogue of releases. It may not bring radical change to the table, but the album makes up for a lack of novelty with the same swirling dream-pop I've come to know and love. If you liked the Aria Rostami record I reviewed last week, you'll love this. 

Cassette Corner: Order Anura

Order Anura - Order Anura

(Self-Released 2014)

In the biological field of taxonomy, the Anuran order includes all types of frogs and toads, which would explain the amphibious artwork printed on Order Anura's debut cassette cover, as well as the project's Bandcamp profile picture, clipped from the pages of the popular Frog And Toad children's book series. In a way, the name also illustrates the music that wafts from Ivan Heemskerk's apartment: cold and dewy, far removed from the influence of the rest of the world. Liquid organ melodies drip from morning leaves into the a crystalline basin of reverb, while Heemskerk's misty vocals bubble to the surface, coated in hiss. It is processional music that echoes through an empty cathedral, one that occupies a plane of reality that we do not. There are no bodies to absorb it, no obstacles for it to bounce off of. It is alien and haunting, in the vein of another keyboard-pop favorite of mine, Bevo Francis' Sun City Welcoming. Following the brief, but powerful set of seven original tunes on Order Anura is a spare and surprisingly emotion-inducing cover of "Overworld" from Gargoyle's Quest, a Game Boy title from 1990. Perhaps one day, Heemskerk will team up with California's Morgue Toad to create the ultimate collection of amphibious lo-fi melancholia.