#780 Autre Ne Veut - Anxiety

Singing is so...boring. These days, a single vocal track is just a building block for piling vocal towers to the sky, a yarn for sonic sweaters of impossible richness and warmth, an acorn promising explosion into roots and branches and sounds beyond mankinds making. These days everyone's autotuned, bent and blasted, and rerereredubbed, whether by technology or just curious choices of composition. Problem is, motherfuckers don't know when to stop. TV on the Radio's neo-barbarshop barrage lent every track on Young Liars heft, but the band fell into leaden murk on every full-length thereafter. Dirty Projectors tipped from exhilarating to grating in the span of about songs. And don't even get me started on whatever it is Crystal Castles is doing.

Here though, we seem to have turned some kind of corner, as Autre Ne Veut has managed to make an album that truly plays with the voice, that is wildly playful in its use of effects and layers and sounds, an album that legitimately turns human voices into autonomous digital beasties and lets them run wild on the record. This is vocal fuckery off-leash, managing to make a skeletal, crystaline mystery that maintains warmth and accessibility, a sound that you're neither smothered nor alienated by. A subtle trick that, a trick made of tricks, all woven over bassy, glitchy R&B landscapes the buck and roil at the whim of some unseen elder god. This is a frustratingly unknowable pop-not-pop record of fractal complexity; that it's mostly listenable while being largely inscrutable is an achievement 4/5