Review: meltycanon - "soft and wet"

meltycanon - soft and wet
(2016 Self-Released)

I've scheduled all my classes for the evenings of this current semester. The tranquility of my weekday morning routine is just too cozy to give up for an 8 AM lecture - hop out of the shower, play some Earthbound on my Wii U, then smooth over the rough patches of reviews I'd left unfinished from the night before while warming my hands on a mug of meltycanon's meditative brand of twee trap. Alchemically fusing King Krule's spartan jazz arrangements with weightless dancehall vibes and a sprinkle of Yo La Tengo eccentricity to taste, his first proper LP release, soft and wet, is best experienced in a state of crusty-eyed drowsiness. It's a watercolor augment to the half-conscious mind, a long soak in a tub filled with languid major seventh chords and frothy tufts of bubbly synth leads. At its best, the record is a fully immersive cloud of late-teenage melancholia, vaporous cuts like the bubblegum-ambient "behelit" or "budew" and its spearmint sting sinking into the listener's aural tastebuds like candy melted on the tongue. A holy union of bedroom pop humanism and the automaton bliss of PC Music, soft and wet is the soundtrack to a laptop's cat nap.

Review: Rei⋆Clone - "Wet"

Rei⋆Clone - Wet

(2016 Smoked Cheese Records)

Wet is as packed with woolen textures and reverb-soaked hooks as a log of Nutraloaf is dense in essential vitamins. Akin to those tiny dollar store capsules that shed their plastic shells and expand into primary-colored sponge dinosaurs when submerged in water, Rei⋆Clone's latest EP is a glass vial filled with a highly unstable compound of visceral fuzz-rock guitaristry, murky vocal harmonies and gusts of violin that resemble distant whale songs. It's a coupling of My Bloody Valentine's muggy atmosphere and the gale-force aggression of Perfect Pussy - an aesthetic match made in shoegaze heaven, but one that produces cyclonic results. Opener "Ready To Die" is an immediate torrent of cymbal splashes and trebly chords pouring down on your windshield, the air a pea soup green cloud of cirrostratic strings and gloomy feedback. Standout "Cat Planet Suicide" is perhaps the most memorably anthemic cut of the bunch, drowning woozy vocals in undulating waves of Nickelodeon slime, though this a record best consumed in a single sitting to cushion the impact of its condensed dream-pop taste. When the Third Impact strikes and you're forced to head to your underground bunker, bring a few nonperishable cans of powdered Rei⋆Clone along with you. Few records pack as much dreaminess into as little time as Wet does, and its timelessly washed-out tone earns it an expiration date that's eons into the future.