Best New Tracks - Pitchfork: Jerome LOL: "Fool" [ft. Angelina Lucero] |  |
- Jerome LOL: "Fool" [ft. Angelina Lucero]
- Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks: "Little Fang"
- Todd Terje: "Delorean Dynamite"
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Posted: 10 Feb 2014 02:36 PM PST
Much of Jerome Potter's output, first as a LOL Boy andnow as a solo artist, has been polyamorous and winsome, flirting with an assortment of styles without ever finding a fixed home. Dancehall fritters, grin-inducing early house, chart pop and plenty more have been molten and pooled into different casings to see what worked. That approach reached its logical conclusion on this month's very good Deleted/Fool EP, setting into a lumpen object you could actually grip.
"Fool" is the emotional bedrock of the good four-tracker, a more contemplative turn for the usually happy-go-lucky producer. Potter once again calls upon frequent collaborator Angelina Lucero, this time to express a deep disconnect that appears to weigh heavy on his shoulders: her voice, given a subtly modulated taint, lands wonkily where you'd expect a clean connection. The upper-register harmonies are affixed to a beat with a low centre of gravity that trundles along like a misshapen stone wheel down a dimly-lit street. Make no mistake, this is still the kind of bright cut we've come to expect from him, but the sprinkles of xylophone and clean synth washes feel like fragments of a recently-recalled, closed-off past; the colour, for once, has been muted. Jerome LOL: "Fool" [ft. Angelina Lucero] on SoundCloud.  |
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Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks: "Little Fang"
Posted: 10 Feb 2014 11:54 AM PST
Front page photo by Atiba Jefferson
The last time Dave Portner released music apart from Animal Collective, it was in the form of 2010's low-key, moody LP Down There, an intriguing mix of soundscapes and drifting elegies that addressed a difficult period in Portner's personal life. The songs collected on Down There sounded swampy and waterlogged, so "Little Fang", the first single from Enter the Slasher House, the debut from his new band Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, is a welcome surprise. The jangly, sauntering cut still retains some of Portner's trademarks from his work in Animal Collective and by his lonesome—a distinct sense of murkiness, stray sound effects that sound as if they were ripped from a funhouse ride—but the melody is pleasingly straightforward, a glammy earworm reminiscent of fellow Los Angeles denizen and cosmic brethren Ariel Pink. Both Animal Collective and Portner make music that, more often than not, resists easy categorization, so who knows whether the rest of Enter the Slasher House (out April 7 internationally and the following day in the U.S. via Domino) will sound like this—but even if it doesn't, the simple pleasures of "Little Fang" will surely remain intact.  |
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Posted: 10 Feb 2014 07:18 AM PST
Slotted as it is after the ecstatic "Strandbar" on Todd Terje's forthcoming full-length, It's Album Time, "Delorean Dynamite" is tasked with maintaining a high energy level. So Terje, master DJ that he is, ups the beat ever so carefully, the streamlined surges of "Delorean" clocking in at 124 BPMs. From there, cosmic disco, Italo, Balearic guitar lines, Model 500 basslines and more converge on this delirious, skyward track.
Todd Terje: "Delorean Dynamite" on SoundCloud.  |
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