Review Summary: o_i
As a long time Lights fan and as such a frequent visitor of her Spotify page, I was pleased to see one day that there was a new EP that I had no prior knowledge of. After selecting
AM 444, I saw that it was actually a collaborative effort between her, and another artist called i_o. Although I had never heard of the latter, the black and neon purple album art was a giveaway that this i_o fellow was an electronic music producer of some sort. Surely enough, a few seconds into the opening track
Annihilation was all it took for me know that i_o had taken our synthpop princess by the hand, and escorted her into the exhilarating world of electronic dance music.
The aforesaid track begins with a driving bass beat with a pounding quarter note kick drum that persists throughout. Lights wastes no time commencing the song's mantra: "Tell me why you hurt me / What's your fascination? / Come and bring your body to me / I crave annihilation". Her voice echoes throughout the entire EP as if she is singing in a desolate location, which creates a haunting contrast to the tenacious dance beats that conjure images of parties or raves full of people, or full of bodies, rather. Lights is no stranger to electronic music despite her work veering more toward pop, but hearing her voice over original EDM tracks for the first time feels like two people who have never met before instantly connecting and becoming best friends.
To elaborate a little more on the beats of the other three tracks,
Run showcases a slightly slower, piano-driven melody that crescendos after a minute and a half into a torrent of repeated sixteenth notes (and-a-one, e-and-a, x100).
Drift Away plays more on the treble side of the spectrum, with a high-end synth lead overlapping finger snaps on beats 2 and 4.
Epilogue concludes with more of the loud but satisfying kick drum from
Annihilation, along with synth and bass that sound spacey, dreamy.
With a total runtime of 14 minutes and with only one track that barely scrapes past the four-minute mark, I wish that i_o and Lights had opted into more repetition, i.e. allowing the beats to play on for a bit longer with or without vocals. But this criticism is also a testament to how much I enjoy how
AM 444 sounds; I just want there to be more. Still, even if it only lasts for a short time, these two artists have created a nice little chunk of ethereal EDM that I'm sure any fan of the style or of Lights herself would enjoy.
