Again - Oneohtrix Point Never: Review

Oneohtrix Point Never

is an ambient and experimental electronic music producer. He's spent well over a decade releasing some of the most interesting and conceptual projects within the respective genres. With recent projects he has transitioned away from classic ambient stylings to a larger variety of sonic aesthetics. Again is one of the furthest-reaching instrumental indulgences he's undertaken to date.

Review by Lav:

I've been a fan of OPN for a long time. His 2011 album Replica is a modern ambient masterpiece and he followed it up with a pair of spectacular albums in R Plus Seven and Garden Of Delete. While I wasn't crazy about his next project Age Of in 2018 he returned to my good graces with 2020's Magic, an album that has only grown on me since I first reviewed it. For that reason I was pretty excited about Again and ready to break it down in all it's details.

But now that I've heard the record, I think that's the wrong way to go about it. The project is often extremely formless and even its most rigid moments come back-to-back with its most surreal and unpredictable. Thats why while I can sometimes get bogged down in technicalities, this review is mostly about vibes. 

So let's get the bad vibes out of the way first. This album deploys a lot more sung vocals than I anticipated and occasionally it doesn't go over great. Krumville is a meeting of acoustic and electronic that is novel at first, but it all serves as set-up for some incredibly slow and flat refrains that don't do the track any favors. The other place the vocals feel like a slip up is The Body Trail. The song is built around these short little vocal snippets but I don't think they're all that interesting and the dreamy faze that surrounds it feels almost standard for OPN at this point. 

Another surprising point on the record is the influence of prog music. One of my least favorite tracks on the album is Nightmare Paint. The track really is just a vintage piece of prog rock that we would be calling wankerous and dated if it came from almost anyone else. That sound also seeps in to Ubiquity Road which does have some pretty synth flourishes but ultimately doesn't live up to its 5-minute runtime. 

Thankfully that's most of the issues I have with the album. Like many OPN projects some of the shorter and more focused songs provide compelling and whimsical journeys between the record's more substantial moments. Opening track Elsewhere, the exciting string section Gray Subviolet and the sheer buzzing bliss of the final minute of On An Axis all fall under that category. 

In contrast, the most lengthy and substantial moments on the project are also major highlights. A Barely Lit Path was a dreamy and expansive journey that I absolutely loved as a single and I still like it a lot on the album. The other 6+ minute cut Memories Of Music has a take on prog that I'm a bit more of a fan of given how grating he's willing to take the wiry guitars. I think the synthst that make up the background also wander through some fascinating places and when they have their moment in the spot light across the last minute of the song it's brilliant. 

While many places on the second half of the record take a bit more of a rigidly formed approach to their compositions, the first half of the record is absolutely chaotic. The title track is a wonderfully compelling sonic experience whose layers of synth sounds give way to this deeply compelling formless exploration of quiet space. I love the tension-building sirens and fluttering electronic dissonance. Locrian Midwest is another one of my favorite songs here. It reminds me of recent Matmos cute with the frenetic stopping and starting of samples but they're deployed here so spaciously and with so much room for everything to breathe. Everything from the water droplets to the grinding buzzsaws comes together to work wonders. 

Other tracks have similar appeal. World Outside shifts through sung vocals with processing and effects that I really like into pounding drums and wiry riffs that end the song on a nice flourish. Plastic Antique comes through with stuttering glitchy synths and pulsating drums that eventually give way to much dreamier passages.

I don't think I did a very good job at avoiding technicalities. To simplify my thoughts on the sonic results of the album's compositionally playfulness, Again is permanently liminal in the most literal sense. The constant anticipation of a new sweeping passage that cane from anywhere from the most spacious and dreamy to the most pounding and noisy. It creates an album that is greater than the sum of its parts because it slides through even its most trudging passages with something entirely new around every corner. While the loss of some of the neater elements of OPN's early work manifests in a lack of poise, it's replaced by a sporadic sense of adventure that I never got tired of following along with. 7/10

For more electronica check out my review of James Blake's Playing Robots Into Heaven