Destiny - DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ
This album man. DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ has never been a project to limit itself and in one of the most indulgent moves they've undertaken yet they dropped this 41-track, nearly 4 hour record. Normally I would take that as an over-indulgence and look the other way entirely like I did with Mac Demarco's 200-track nightmare earlier this year. The difference is unlike Mac, DJ Sabrina are used to long, winding projects and I've enjoyed their material a lot in recent years.
So when I try to justify skipping this album I can't help but think of moments I like so much in it. Fan-favorite singles like Doubts and Something New or personal highlights like the future funk-inspired anthem of self-empowerment Get Over It. Though the music on this album is not directly trance-inspired and generally takes a much less methodical and sunnier approach, it is still very easy to become entranced by it. The long compositions and absolute mountain of runtime means that listening to this project often meant extended bouts of thoughtless vibing, which is not at all a complaint. The fact that the project doesn't feel like every minute of its full 4 hours is a good thing. It combats inconsistencies that emerge in the tracklist. One thing I can say is that nearly every song here is at least built on a good idea and there are plenty of highlights beyond the ones I mentioned earlier. But while many tracks find way to expand upon those ideas effectively, others fall pretty short. On a lot of albums I would describe that as time wasted, but on Destiny that indulgence is clearly part of the appeal. This absolute mass of blissful, sunny, life-affirming electronica won't be for everybody and it's not my favorite album from the project yet, but I enjoyed getting lost in it every single time. 7/10
SBTRKT is a British DJ project who intrigued me when I was first getting into music. That was mostly because their 2011 debut is a curious fusion of dance styles with an absolutely stacked list of talented features. But now more than a decade removed from that project I'm less sure than ever when intrigue the project has last. I wasn't crazy about their sophomore album 9 years ago and aside from hearing Sampha's voice again I wasn't expecting much from this new album after hearing the singles. Even then, revisiting the project just a few months later for this review led me to double down on how little I truly understand the motivation behind any of this.
The Rat Road is a very messy album. Its 22 songs only add up to 51 minutes because all tracks are very much not made equal. There's a very Avalanches feel to this the way they bring different styles and collaborators together within this wandering format of tracks that feel loosely connected at best. But on an Avalanches record there is normally a throughline, whether sonically or conceptually, that makes the musical experience feel whole. On The Rat Road these songs really do not seem like they have a single goddamn thing to do with each other and the tracklisting feels like it was picked out of a hat. That doesn't mean that the album is completely without redeemable moments. I think the first half of DAYS GO BY with Toro Y Moi is pretty good and WAITING with Teezo Touchdown eventually takes shape once it starts sounding like the music and vocals are from the same song. Sampha's first appearance on the record is truly smothered by some searing synths that are the icing on the cake of one of the album's worst instrumentals. Thankfully his next appearance just a song later is better despite having some equally annoying squelching synth lines.
That's kind of the thing with this album. I can identify parts of songs that I like, usually not entire songs. But the end results are absolutely less than the sum of its parts as listening to this rickety assembly of music thrown together seemingly at random for 55 minutes is deeply unpleasant. I didn't anticipate liking this album very much, but I also didn't anticipate just how unpleasant of a listening experience it would ultimately end up being. 3/10
Ooh Rap I Ya - George Clanton
I think George Clanton's 2018 album Slide is solid. While that sounds like a compliment, there are plenty of people who would take that as sacrilege as certain communities online see his fusion of shoegaze and vaporwave as gospel. Even though I wasn't completely head over heels in love with the album I did like it a lot and today I think I may even appreciate it a bit more than I used to. Part of that may come from just how little I got out of his collaborative album with 311 frontman Nick Hexum. Regardless I was still really interested in what he had in store with a new album and that interest grew after hearing the singles. In particular the album's second single Justify Your Life is a piece of 80's nostalgia that hits an absolute sweet spot for me and might be my favorite of Clanton's tracks to date.
The album turns out just 9 tracks that run under 40 minutes but it makes an effort to pack quite a bit into that runtime, for better or for worse. I get almost nothing out of the intro song Everything I Want and while the first half of Vapir King/SubReal sounds slightly better in the context of the album than it did as a single it still feels like a measure to fill out time more than anything else. But even then the flashes of Ooh Rap I Ya's magnetic ability to recover quickly show as the second half SubReal is a major highlight. I've also come around to the lead single I Been Young a good bit since I first heard it. One big reason is the double helping of hazy vintage bliss it serves up alongside Punching Down. Another is that despite the verses still being a bit silly for me the chorus has just burrowed into my brain. Even though I don't think the second half is quite as strong as the first it has highlights of its own. The sentiment on F.U,M.L are pretty clear and pretty relatable for reasons I won't spoil. The title track also drags its nostalgia directly into the 90s which arguably hits an even sweeter note for me even if its repetition isn't the most compelling songwriting element.
On Ooh Rap I Ya some things have changed, but much more has stayed the same. While it's lost some of the weight of its shoegazey style what has come in its place are crisp drum patterns and mixing that makes things in no way clearer than they used to be. For that reason it feels like a very reasonable successor to Slide and while I'm not sure I like this one quite as much as its predecessor, there's still quite an impressive amount of good material here. 7.5/10
