Saturday, February 23, 2013

#771 Moon B - Moon B

On his debut, producer Moon B offers up sludgy, hazy take on 80's techno, with dashes of that wildly-unpleasant, wrong-RPM dissonance that's so hot right now. Loose in structure, but often too loose - songs wander around and fade out, or just stop in their tracks, like drunks who closed out their nights with doubles. The mysterious packaging and unspecific track naming suggest that the album's lo-fi aesthetic and unpolished composition are part of its charm, but the effect isn't altogether successful; it still sounds like a bent-for-its-own-sake post-EDM album wallowing in retro trappings.

For stretches it works. A couple of the best tracks will take you on a neon Delorean trip through desert city nowhere, and your head lolls, and you start to let time dissolve. But then some unpleasant dissonant bend, over-assertive bleep, or over-repeated loop will harsh your buzz. When this happens roughly once a track, you're hard pressed to find the proceedings altogether conducive to losing yourself in. When those moments are not just disruptive but gratingly ill-conceived, you're hard-pressed to end up much higher than 2.5/5

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