Review Summary: Terry-D swoop down, six foot wings and a golden crown.
Its taken a long time to put this into words. Every time I believe I have a solid understanding of this album, I listen again and my sentiment shifts. It's difficult to explain how Jake Atlas does it. How he can create a sonic experience that slides through your ear canal and drips into your brain. How you can be infected by the synth lines and invigorated by the energy and texture of each different track. How you can find yourself exploring a labyrinthine complex of telephonic arpeggios and pristine sub-bass layers until you realize the album has come full-circle and you’re starting in the same place you began.
It isn’t easy for an electronic album to sound truly fresh. Every producer carefully crafts their own synths and snares. They spend hours crooning over their sidechains and they tweak the volume of that one hi-hat five hundred times, but in the end, do they have something they truly birthed? Is it as unique as they’d like to believe? Atlas can be safe in the assumption that his slick synthesis is truly a snowflake and that his song progression goes against what everyone in mainstream electronic music would tell you is law.
The cynical hip-hop atmosphere is persistent, yes, but each song takes this style in a different direction. Earlee Mondee with its ambient scratches and drop-key vocals, Fornever with its tremolo synth and Grass Knives with its distinctive jazz flute. Atlas weaves a complex musical enigma that feels like a night with too much codeine and not enough to do. Track after track throws curves in the purported trajectory of the album until you’re left with a cerebral but confusing maze of distorted samples and ambient effects. I’d recommend this album to anyone with a working pair of ears and a brain between them, this album is what every boiler room set wishes it was.
