Day 83: Delorean – Subiza

I wonder what people will think when they listen back on the chillwave wave of 2010. Will this music sound as disco does to most ears, completely incongruous with any mode of existence that seems reasonable? Who would listen to this? Why? Were the people of 2010 driving around in convertibles with the top down on sunny days all year? Did global warming give us a surfeit of beach days?

Was there a beach blanket boom?

Sometimes sounds just come together, though, and one band does something, another does it better, and then another still combines everything so far, and a genre that hasn’t celebrated its anniversary suddenly seems to have traversed a clear arc to get to you, when you may not have even seen its point A or B.

Here, Delorean achieves just that. Sounding like a mashup DJ “best of 2010” mix tailored to the greatest desert-island party you couldn’t afford the helicopter fare to, Subiza flawlessly conveys a shitload of every positive human feeling I can think of.

catharsis (pluralcatharses)

noun

1. (drama) A release of emotionaltension after an overwhelmingvicarious experience, resulting in the purging or purification of the emotions, as through watching a dramaticproduction (especially a tragedy). Coined in this sense by Aristotle.

These guys have that shit down. Their amalgamation of the best elements of indie rock, house music, and MDMA-fueled revelry absolutely shines with light, serrating its seams, and just about every song has some great release. They have a wide range of techniques and a deft hand with them, because this album never falls into the cycle of some (even good) techno records where every track seems to be an excuse to pitch an insane breakdown. Rather, the songs on Subiza just swell and swell with joy, gibbering giggles from your mouth. “Come Wander” is the soundtrack to a caper if I’ve ever heard one; “Grow” rescues one of the despairing female voices from a Burial track and washes her in honey; the songs abound with almost-excessively multi-tracked handclaps, synths, tribal drums, and Merriweather Post Pavilion-esque party klaxons; “Simple Graces” sends rays of giddy guitar to Heaven where they bounce off of Heaven’s force field and fall back to earth, heating to 350 degrees above absolute chill and pouring on the heads of Molly-munching trust-fund teenagers — kids unsullied by disappointment, whose skins are thick from caress — on their third tour of Ibiza, raining on them like the tears of a mother reunited with the child that was kidnapped from its cradle and kept hostage by Basque terrorists for three years, bringing them — at long, long last, the wait having driven her to the brink of emotional collapse — shuddering into each others arms.

Delorean’s lyrics are pretty terrible, though, but they’re Spanish, and what’s more important is they speak music.

Day 60: Gram Rabbit – Cultivation

What a curious specimen. Rhapsody had this filed as “alt-country,” probably because trying to figure out what other genre to put it under is kind of a maddening exercise.

Gram Rabbit are from the desert, somewhere, says their PR. I can see it: there are many nights contained within this album, nights spent with brain-pans sizzling with psilocybin, watching sagebrush shrug off stubborn desert winds. Really, that leads to what was tough to like about this: it ends up sounding like a dream journal, a collection of free-association stories that tell a story that made sense in the context of someone else’s subconscious. Not just lyrically, either, but stylistically the album skips around, flirting with a dozen genres. Unfortunately they never go beyond that dreamy curiosity, as every time they start to pick up speed in any one direction, a song like “Charlie’s Kids”, some kind of unbearably grating nursery-rhyme pop, comes along and kicks the album in the knees. Gram Rabbit called their first album Music to Start a Cult to. They obviously have a sense of their own mystique and are trying to brandish it, but in the case of this album it interferes with the music and ends up sounding quite a lot, actually, like someone reading their dream journal to you. You weren’t there, and what they’re describing is inherently meaningless to you. It’s really, really hard to give a shit about it.