![]() But good lord, he’s good at this stuff.Īnything In Return is out now on. I don’t want to argue with Bundick’s thinking there lord knows he’s talented enough to pull off whatever style he picks next. In, Bundick talks about how he was trying to make straight-up pop on this album, and how he doesn’t think he’ll make an album like this again. This whole thing is, of course, an act, on some level at least. The whole ’70s-playboy act doesn’t hide Bundick’s innate gawkiness, but that gawkiness becomes contained and comfortable, just as it does within the songs themselves. He’s boarding a Cessna and splaying out on mossy ground and making time with a ridiculously beautiful girl. Suddenly, he’s chilling in forests, on mountaintop chalets, wearing mock-turtlenecks and somehow making them work. The HARRYS-directed videos for “So Many Details” and “Say That” give visual accompaniment to the sonic makeover that Bundick has given himself with this album. “Harm In Change” hasn’t even become a single yet, but the two songs already number among my favorite singles of the year. Near the end of “,” a sample of a rapper saying “yeah” become a part of the beat, and it somehow adds to the propulsion rather than distracting. These songs keep Bundick’s breezy romanticism intact, but they’re hard and chilly dance tracks, with house-diva moans and lonely horn-bursts and BPMs that just pound. And I haven’t even talked about the opening one-two punch of “Harm In Change” and “Say That,” which feel something like a thrown gauntlet at the entire idea of that c-word. And when a chorus of thunderous taiko-style drums shows up for the last minute of the song, it’s just thrillingly out-of-place enough to drive the song further home. The title of first single “” doesn’t refer to all the pings and tingles he throws into the track, but it could. The individual sounds are hard and bell-clear, and they’re woven through the songs with definite purpose.īundick knows when to let the piano float in, when to take away the vintage-synth gasp-loop, how long to let the beat ride. About those tracks: God knows how many studio-hours Bundick put into this thing, but unlike Causers Of This, Anything In Return absolutely does not sound like something you could make at home on a laptop. (Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor is also a good comparison point here there’s a level of suave/dweeby intersection at work that we mere mortals will probably never figure out.) Bundick’s voice shouldn’t work for these expertly-assembled pleasure-machine tracks, but it does, and the ballsiness of putting that voice front and center only makes the entire thing cooler. I promise not to keep bringing up Pharrell, but the way Bundick’s built these elaborate tracks around his own decidedly unspectacular voice reminds me of the way Skateboard P interrupted Jay-Z’s godly party-flow on “I Just Wanna Love U” so that he could bust out his terrible Curtis Mayfield impression and somehow sound badass doing it. Bundick’s not the type to slather reverb on his voice, and his thin and unshowy tenor has become more confident he’s pushing it further to the front of the mix. As you delve deep into Anything In Return, the queasy textures and searching sincerity and Dilla-fried bass-wobbles start to reappear.īut now, those things are working to serve simple and elegant pop songs - love songs, usually, or songs about losing yourself in another person. That’s not to say Bundick has broken completely from the music he made before he hasn’t. That’s a pretty staggering achievement, all told. ![]() ![]() And in the exceedingly small category of “dorked-out but somehow effortlessly smooth half-black/half-Filipino soul-pop singer/producers beloved of Tyler, The Creator” the Bundick of Anything In Return has come to rival circa-2002 Pharrell. Instead, it’s exceedingly well-realized studio-pop music, music with all its moving parts in place. ![]() His music doesn’t sound like he recorded it in an amniotic gloop-chamber, and it doesn’t evoke lost memories of watching Superhuman Samurai Cyber Squad. But Anything In Return is the moment where Bundick has broken away completely and built something resembling a concrete persona, developing a matter-of-fact disco-pop slickness that sounds way sharper and more defined than anything he’s done before. And even at first, he had more Dilla than Ariel Pink in him. On Underneath The Pines a couple of years ago, he was already pushing toward a squelchy, psychedelic sort of soul-pop, a one-man genre built from stray moments on old Stevie Wonder albums. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |