Review Summary: Our friends have turned their backs
But somehow that's okay
I’ll just come out and say this: “Shadow” is one of the most raw and emotional albums of the year. While previous efforts by the producer-cum-singer signaled someone equally in debt to Sade and Aphex Twin, as time has gone by and his catalogue has grown he’s become more hard to define. These projects seemed completely at home in the pantheon of moody singer-songwriters that made 2011 an A+ year in music (see: James Blake, The Weeknd, Sampha, Drake), first single “Deepend” was a bit more lush and analog. It eschewed the aforementioned’s minimalism in favor of a woodsy and pensive feeling. As opposed to feeling emotionally depleted like his contemporaries, the music of Mister Lies as of late has felt emotionally charged in a way that almost no other artist does (save for James Blake on “Overgrown”). Despite this new found emotional depth, one could be forgiven for thinking it a red herring, the sole bit of emotion on another blippy computer record. And while this may be the assumption, “Shadow” actually reveals itself to be an intensely beautiful and emotive record, moreso than any other record this year.
The first three tracks are, in many ways, the album’s worst tracks. The fact that Deepend is one of them gives a fair indication of how good the album gets. “Nymph” elegiacally floats into frame with a skeletal beat and muddy vocal samples, before materializing into “Deepend.” “Deepend” itself is a straight-forward violin-assisted ballad, decked out with many peripheral sounds that lend it depth. The lyrics, essentially about resignation to loneliness, hit in a particularly meaningful way, especially when Zanca belts the bridge in the song’s final minute. “New Woof” takes “Deepend”’s momentum and compounds it, with scornful lyrics about why he and his lover just can’t figure things out (memorably saying “this is why we can’t have nice things” in a way that wrings out all irony).
The next few tracks continually expand the emotional palette of the album while still maintaining its nocturnal glow. “High,” which features Harrison Lipton, takes on a vague R&B vibe. The verse melody sounds almost like something that latter-day Mary J. Blige or Fantasia would belt out while backed by a gospel choir. But Zanca does it alone, backed only by a mournful piano and a ruminative beat. When he’s joined by apparitions of himself on the second chorus, the instrumental elements push towards a climax gorgeously, making the central question of the song (“is this still high enough?”) more immediate, more yearning. The breakdown after that is breath-taking in its execution, going from pensive ballad into something off an Arca or Zomby release. “Pill” takes this genre-permuting spirit even further, turning a somewhat corny Rhodes keyboard line into a danceable bit of melancholy. Something that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Philip Bailey record from the 1980s is turned into a lush bit of bedroom fodder, complete with bass guitar and Benny Mardones-style lyricism. “Pill” ultimately becomes the album’s best track, if only because of its masterful lyrical and sonic cohesion. The pulsing beat and appropriated Rhodes riff become the perfect cushion for Zanca’s prurient platitudes.
The album’s last two tracks take the more digital elements of the album and magnify them, building towards an electronic climax that exemplifies the lyrical push-and-pull of the album. What was just a conflict between two lovers on “Deepend” and “New Woof” is now a conflict between the natural and the mechanized, the digital and the analogue. This conflict plays out on “Stuck / Ouija Fade,” a song that teeters between an amazingly sensual guitar line and a beat ripped straight from µ-Ziq’s “Lunatic Harness.” The “Ouija Fade” part of the aforementioned takes a beautiful piano interlude and turns it into a world-ending glitch, with the cracks forming into a picturesque mosaic of sound. From this, Zanca’s voice emerges. He sings another verse to the melody of “Deepend” before the bottom falls out and “Push Becoming Shove” takes a fully digital approach. The song sounds like something that Thom Yorke wishes he could have done on his latest album, as Zanca takes a modern box of a beat and fills it with the last vestiges of his humanity. While the song features more electronic elements than anything else on this album (eschewing the strings and piano for pure bass and synth action), elements of many of the previous songs can still be heard (a vocal cut from “High,” a warped piano cut from “Deepend,”), lending the song a necessary finality.
One of the most profound things about this album is how it embodies the last 4 years of musical evolution without becoming a list of influences. "Shadow" finds a place for the glitchy hip-hop of Flying Lotus, the electronic balladry of James Blake and the lushness of Bonobo, all while keeping his own voice and themes at the center. “Shadow” finds the perfect middle ground between electronic tinkering and traditional songcraft, yielding to one side only as a thematic expression of the other’s absence. The lyrical themes of solitude and self-doubt are all translated into the lush sonic soundscapes. But trying to academically deconstructive of this album is a largely irrelevant exercise. What really matters is that Mister Lies has crafted one of, if not the, best album of 2014.
