Review Summary: Stay the night, and we'll make waves gently.
On 2012’s
Yesterday is a Distant Dream, OJ Law finally perfected the brand of indie rocktronica that he introduced several years prior with the gritty one-two punch of
Timezones and
Law. But
Let’s Be Adult, his fourth long-player, finds the Malaysian singer-songwriter abruptly choosing to jettison his familiar brand of brooding, 24-bit bedroom rock in favor of shimmery, early-2000s dream pop that’s a lot closer to Passion Pit than it is to Oasis. In other words,
Let’s Be Adult seems to be saying just that: it’s time to grow up and move on.
If there’s one bit of criticism that can be made of OJ Law’s pre-LP4 discography, it’s that his tunes, while generally interesting, often operated in a fairly narrow stylistic range.
Let’s Be Adult doesn’t take long to position itself as an altogether different preposition – the record opens with the glossy “All We Have Is Erased", an angular, piano-propelled blast of glacial synth-pop that falls somewhere within the spectrum defined by acts like Cloud Boat and Chromatics. The roiling "Oils and Acrylics" and the sultry “Unfamiliar Ceiling” are next, but things truly begin to kick into high gear with the appearance of the dizzying "Introverts”, a lush neo-Britpop gem that wraps a funky, elastic synth line around a simple vocal melody which just keeps going and going in a way that only the best beats know how to. The entire song may be set to a tale of a chance encounter between two strangers at a rank-and-file dance club, but when OJ Law intones, “Oh my fellow introvert/I’m tired of knowing no-one/So would you care to dance?” you can’t help but root for something magical to happen between the two underdogs.
Elsewhere, the elliptical "Tongue-Tied” also navigates similar narratives: “If you tell me what it means to you/Oh love, I’ll tell you what it means to me," sings OJ Law over a bed of serpentine harmonies that quickly start applying for permanent residence in your headspace. The Malaysian has already built a sturdy reputation for having a keen ear for intricate arrangements, but here he tackles the currency of conventional pop music with gusto, pairing a sparkling guitar line with a nu-disco beat to pleasantly surprising results. Then there’s the dreamy “Waves Gently”, which finds him exploring distinctively spectral melodies with intoxicating otherworldliness; it’s genuinely hard to see how the number could be any better, even if vocal duties were handed to an out-and-out R&B singer. The title track ends up more or less back where the album started, with OJ Law reviving his interest in quirky retro-pop once again, but things never once come close to feeling stale.
In retrospect, while
Yesterday is a Distant Dream was the first OJ Law release that was afforded a proper launch, the record quickly became synonymous with the way local English acts tend to be regarded in this part of the world: occasionally perused but rarely championed over their Western counterparts. But with
Let’s Be Adult OJ Law might just have the means to break that vicious cycle. If nothing else, he has at least dispelled any concerns that his art form is one-dimensional, and that is as good a statement of growing edges as anyone can ever hope to make.
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