Five Records, Five Rooms
Devonté Hynes has always seemed like someone escaping his own previous work. As Test Icicles he was noisy and angular; as Lightspeed Champion he went quiet and confessional; and then Blood Orange arrived and suddenly he was back in his bedroom, making something that sounds like the eighties filtered through frosted glass. Coastal Grooves is ten songs that feel simultaneously intimate and slightly unreachable—the way certain memories feel when you’re no longer sure they happened the way you remember. New Wave without the irony, which is harder to pull off than it sounds and rarely attempted seriously.
Pat Grossi works as Active Child, a one-man project that sounds like it required seventeen people and a cathedral. You Are All I See is his debut—choral arrangements stacked on top of folkish melancholy, somewhere in the territory between Fleet Foxes and a devotional fever dream. Grossi was a choirboy in Los Angeles, which explains a lot. There’s a quality in every track of singing toward something he can’t name and wouldn’t want to name, because naming it would break the spell.
Bernhardt Fleischmann committed himself to music at thirteen, which is either impressive or worrying depending on your relationship with teenage single-mindedness. The Austrian producer spent his formative years building toward what Pop Loops For Breakfast represents: electronic compositions that feel precise and dreamlike simultaneously, impressionist work that doesn’t announce its influences and doesn’t need to. Each element placed with the care of someone who has no interest in doing it any other way.
Takagi Masakatsu makes music the way a good cinematographer makes images—entirely about light and atmosphere and the negative space between things rather than structure or narrative progression. He’s a Japanese filmmaker and multimedia artist whose work Apple eventually adopted as a kind of visual-sonic ambassador, but Eating from 2002 predates that recognition entirely. It’s the sound of someone translating visual impressions directly into frequencies without pausing to explain the process. Peaceful without being passive. That’s a genuinely difficult combination.
La 3e heure! assembled the Cover Me mixtape for the Bang Bang radio show—a covers compilation that actually justifies its own existence, which is rarer than it should be. Björk’s Army of Me rebuilt from the ground up, Coldplay’s Every Teardrop Is a Waterfall made almost interesting, The xx’s Shelter handled with genuine care. Covering a song well means understanding what the original was actually about, not just knowing the chords. This one gets that.