Review Summary: opening your eyes and looking both ways
For those who don’t know, BACKGROUND: Elite Gymnastics first exploded into the indie blogosphere right at the dawn of the 2010s— the very tail end of the internet’s wild west days— with a vicious onslaught of dreamy synths, clattering sample-heavy beats, and bitingly confessional lyricism. In the Tumblr post she made last year announcing the return of Elite Gymnastics, Jaime Brooks lamented the divergence of the indie music world from the “online counterculture” of mashups, megamixes and bootlegs, despite the many indications throughout the file-sharing era that the two would instead collide head-on. Indeed, it seems Elite Gymnastics showed up to make a slick, cutting-edge pitch for a brave new world of 21st-century electronica just in time to see the door to that world slammed in their faces by streaming corporations and algorithmic ads and paywalls. They released seven EPs before collaborator Josh Clancy quit in 2012; all contain unlicensed samples and, apart from the two uploaded to SoundCloud, cannot be found on any major streaming platform. In much of Brooks’ work as Default Genders since then, the sting of that rejection, that stolen future, has been palpable. But a healthy creative mind cannot thrive on grievance alone (and Brooks’ never has), so with Clancy’s blessing, a valiant attempt has been made to imagine the Elite Gymnastics debut that never was, returning to the fan-favorite
Ruin 1 EP and a smattering of other old material to polish it up, rework it where necessary, and round it out with new lessons learned in the intervening decade. That’s
snow flakes 2022, equal parts long-delayed culmination of, and conflicted retrospective on, the moment these songs were birthed by.
Okay now FOREGROUND:
snow flakes 2022 is a near-masterclass in reinterpretation and showcases one of the most exciting producers currently working in largely dazzling fashion, highlighting everything that made Elite Gymnastics a breath of fresh air in the first place and arguing eloquently for their sound and ethos’s continued relevance. Material that previously sulked within the safety of its own day-glow ravehaze has been cracked open, confronted head-on, forced to distinguish itself. At worst, this newfound variety comes at the expense of a more concentrated dose of that ineffable Elite Gymnastics aesthetic: “How Could You Do It?” swaps the programmed keys and 808s of “So Close to Paradise” for jangly guitar and lively Motown-sounding drums, while “Here, in Heaven” and “Omamori Piano Fantasy” both balance the futuristic ambience of their original versions with excursions into delicate piano balladry, with assistance from collaborator (and former Sputnikmusic contributor(!!!)) Conrad Tao. I really enjoy Motown-sounding drums and can kinda take or leave most piano balladry, and my personal enjoyment of these experiments broadly falls along similar lines, but in all cases it’s exciting to hear more unexpected sides of songs that already exist in other forms, fresh approaches that want for more than to inhabit the existing perspective on a composition. “Omamori Piano Fantasy” in particular stands out here as an ambitious expansion on “Omamori”, bringing just enough of the original’s flavor to truly appreciate how far it ranges in tempo, timbre and tone.
At its best, the album refines already-great ideas into unquestionably-definitive renditions. Case in point: for everything “Minneapolis Belongs to You” did to crystallize EG as a force to be reckoned with 11 years ago, “It’s Yours!” surpasses it in nearly every regard— more resilient, more assured, more worldly. The simple lyrical shift from “when you’re dead” to “when
I’m dead” gives the song’s lacerating cynicism a softer, sadder center to fall back into, and the diamond-hard beats carefully reveal the song’s fundamentally punk construction while ALSO showing off an exceptionally colorful and roomy mix of soft choral pads against serrated autotune against a headbanging breakbeat. Plus, now there are disses against crypto-bros and the line “So lest the gun from act one go unused, it’s yours”, a phrase so thoroughly laden with intensity and import that it almost feels like a waste to hear it fighting to be heard over the blaze of treated guitars that erupts just seconds ahead of it. Similar magic is made of “We Fly High”, an extremely tiresome and self-involved spoken word piece from the 2010
Real Friends EP. Rechristened “Snow Flakes”, gifted a gleaming boom-bap shuffle and tightened into a conversational midtempo sing-rap, the story shines as a portrait of artistic passion as a light in the dark for a destitute young addict, echoing the frigid urban street-film feel of “Christmas Card from a Scammer in Minneapolis” in its ending moment of tenuous human connection. Brooks lapsing into a rec list of her favorite late-aughts Soulseek discoveries is such a charming and honest moment of music-geekery that the whole song instantly becomes vibrant and lived-in, fully human even as her voice digitally flickers across the mix.
Ultimately,
snow flakes is a very hard album to call faultless. Anyone working with palettes as dense as Brooks is has ample opportunity for ***ups ‘n’ clutter, and yes, there's a degree of jank to be found in “(I Always Cry at) Regenerations”’s abrupt and threadbare finale or in vaporwavey goof interlude “Indistinguishable” or in the occasionally-awkward track sequencing. But for every stumble there’s a phenomenal condensed version of breakcore blitz-fest “Life/Trap”, or a heart-swellingly hopeful rewrite of “Andreja 4-Ever” performed by Chloe Hotline, or a sorta-sequel to
main pop girl 2019’s “Heart Emoji XO” that ensures this album won’t hit Spotify anytime soon with a gleefully pilfered headrush of a chorus (no spoilers). It's a strange sensation to tangibly feel an album becoming one of
those albums, something that instantly impresses itself upon a time and a place and a headspace and an age you will never again be younger than, but that's exactly what I'm experiencing right now with
snow flakes 2022. I know I know that because the same thing happened to me three years ago with
main pop girl 2019. I know I know because of all the people for whom
Ruin 1 is still, and will forever be, the soundtrack of 2011. As the novelty wears off it starts to become about getting it in your bones, memorizing where the beats drop or switch, finding somewhere an extra melody could have gone, where another song could maybe mashup, where a lyric might not even need context to stand out. You and I and Jaime Brooks and anyone else blessed enough to hear this album more than once will continue to re-write and remix and strip it for parts in our own ways every time we listen to it, never quite the same way twice. We can’t help returning— isn’t that kind of beautiful?
