By A surprising Crying and Japanese Breakfast team up, a perfectly satisfactory Action Bronson record, and limp work from Khotin, all in this weeks music roundup.
Action Bronson – ONLY FOR DOLPHINS
Genre: Hip-Hop
Favorite Tracks: “Mongolia,” “Vega”
Action Bronson is a man of prodigious and varied talents. As he makes clear across books, TV, movies, and music, he is deeply committed to being a multi-hyphenate, a passion carried by his magnetic personality and tireless work ethic. As a rapper, the benefits and detriments of having fingers in so many pots are prominently on display in his latest record, ONLY FOR DOLPHINS, a project that meets expectations and does little to exceed them.
On one hand, Bronson’s wide-ranging experience lends his albums some strong qualities. One such strength is borrowed from an unusual place: Bronson does a subtler, less slimy version of Drake’s casual sampling of sounds from around the world, indicative of his well-traveled nature. Where Drake flattens culture for pop consumption and personal gain, Bronson is more deft, pulling an interesting instrument foreign to rap production or adoringly recalling the local cuisine of other cultures. His sincere and unexpected encounter with singer Jah Tiger during a trip to Jamaica led to the phenomenal “Hot Pepper” on his BLUE CHIPS 7000 project. The sample of a baglama played by Turkish artist Urfali Babi on (oddly enough) the track “Mongolia” similarly exemplifies his cultural influence yielding pleasing results.
The production on ONLY FOR DOLPHINS is my favorite of Bronson’s catalog, recruiting a familiar cadre of producers to scaffold his tracks. The mixing also reaches a high point, in that I no longer feel like Bronson is shouting at me from across the room, an issue across WHITE BRONCO and LAMB OVER RICE. Bronson is the most unconventional of The Alchemist’s tight circle of rapper friends. He makes a requisite appearance on ONLY FOR DOLPHINS, but his best beats rarely land on Bronson tracks; The Alchemist collaborations with Bronson feel like a chance to unwind and take the craft a little less seriously. These are lower-stakes efforts, and Bronson lacks the dexterity of flow that Freddie Gibbs or Conway the Machine possess. When music is one arm of your empire, you cannot help but neglect it somewhat to the benefit of other pursuits. That’s fine, and the music is fine, but there’s nothing groundbreaking on ONLY FOR DOLPHINS.
Other lows mostly show themselves in reference to those other pursuits. “Splash” is little more than background music for a fragrance Bronson is dropping; “C12H16N2” uninterestingly devotes most of its runtime to a languid checklist of the hats he wears professionally. Throughout ONLY FOR DOLPHINS, Bronson’s signature mix of hyper-specificity and creative one-bar imagery remains a constant, but at this point, his flow is familiar and largely unvaried. Many lines are slight tweaks to themes we’ve heard elsewhere in the Action Bronson Cinematic Universe; cracks about nudity in unusual locations, entire sheets of acid consumed, and many references to food. To get too hung up on this, though, is to miss the point. No one turns up to an Action Bronson album expecting a show of technique or deep lyrical content. You come to hear a grown man earnestly refer to himself as “Bam Bam Baklavizzy.” On that premise, ONLY FOR DOLPHINS delivers, no more and no less. [Corey Guen]
BUMPER – POP SONGS 2020
Genre: City Pop, Indie Pop
Favorite Tracks: “You Can Get It,” “Red Brick”
Despite having heard COVID-19-era projects from artists ranging from Taylor Swift to White Denim to Charli XCX, I still haven’t fully wrapped my brain around what art made in quarantine is supposed to look or sound like. The best music that has been created under the world’s current duress has carried an asterisk to it, an artistic freedom that equates to a free play in sports; it has become an opportunity for artists to experiment with form and sound without risking much—years down the line we can say “oh, that was their COVID album” with the universal understanding that the surreal circumstances will write off any criticisms about the music, good, bad, or otherwise.
BUMPER, the quarantined side project of Japanese Breakfast’s Michelle Zauner and Crying’s Ryan Galloway, feels low stakes by design, especially given their collaboration was made possible due to the pandemic rather than as a response to it (which most of the decent records recorded during this time have in common). The narrative that the two New York City neighbors developed these songs during quarantine by trading emails back and forth makes the project sound like Zauner and Galloway’s equivalent of doing a Zoom Powerpoint Party, or playing ANIMAL CROSSING or JACKBOX with your friends down the street. Thusly, POP SONGS 2020, the resulting four-song EP, is delightful, and using their free play they use it as an opportunity for Zauner to explore a City Pop wonderment that frequently gets buried in Japanese Breakfast’s more layered, emboldened dream pop production. The first song in particular, “You Can Get It,” is a dazzling, whirring indie pop spectacle, playful interplay with Zauner’s multiple vocal tracks satisfyingly giving way to a simple but rich guitar solo from Galloway in the song’s final moments. Both Japanese Breakfast and Crying have in very different ways been able to lean into sounds that find a robotic sci-fi pop and an arena rock spectacle. BUMPER removes the latter from the equation, striving from the point of inception to be innocuous—the EP name and accompanying video intentionally mimic the lo-fi beats to relax/study to aesthetic—and while the more engaging and sonically interesting tracks are naturally the meat of this EP (“You Can Get It,” “Red Brick”), songs like “Black Light” and especially “Ballad 0” take on an interesting context as music meant to be relegated to the background. BUMPER more than other projects coming out of COVID feels like a luxury as a listener, the kind of partnership that would maybe never have happened in normal times. Even if POP SONGS 2020 will be rife with “oh, that was their COVID EP” qualifiers in even five years time, it’s a brief, breezy way to soundtrack the endless days. [CJ Simonson]
Khotin – FINDS YOU WELL
Genre: Downtempo, Indietronica
Favorite Tracks: “Ivory Tower,” “WEM Lagoon Jump,” “Heavyball”
With their pearly synths, sparse instrumentation, and benign sampling, the early releases of Edmonton producer Dylan Khotin-Foote evoked the nocturnal surreality of a Late Night Tales album cover. But while records like VITEBSK and NEW TAB beep-booped along comfortably enough to remain unobtrusive, there was always a sterility to Khotin’s work that made it feel boring and intentionless alongside the music of his peers like DJ Python and Anthony Naples. A year after his fourth full-length, BEAUTIFUL YOU, Khotin is back with a collection of songs that play like a pretentious four-negronis-deep recommendation from someone 10 years too old to still be hanging out at Zebulon.
From the opening soundscapes of “Processing” to the white noise of closing track “My Toan,” FINDS YOU WELL is music that sounds like a podcaster’s muttered pseudo-intellectual ramblings. It is music that sonically embodies the most irksome qualities of the “Silver Lake voice,” the soft-spoken hipster mumble that so many 27-year-old industry professionals use on their interns when they’re trying to politely insinuate they would like them to just shut the hell up and get back to writing copy. With the Kruder & Dorfmeister-y half-time drum grooves on tracks like “Ivory Tower” and “Heavyball,” even the 40-minute record’s best moments play like elevator music for people who work at Acne Studios. The record plays like chillwave for people who are too cool to still listen to Toro Y Moi, or the most chi-chi background music for an Art Basel installation’s lauded reveal. Listening to FINDS YOU WELL was like being mansplained ambient music by someone who collects mid-century furniture. Even its most engaging track, “Groove 32,” oozes porn stache energy. Where older Khotin tracks like “Frog Fractions” and “Dotty” showcased creative natural sampling to deliver evocative rhythmic ambiences, for the most part FINDS YOU WELL embraces limp funk that feels corny and half-baked.
Although Khotin’s music has never aimed at being particularly exciting, the best elements of the formula that found him fans in the most niche corner of the Boiler Room universe were those that felt singular. Even if records like NEW TAB weren’t exceptionally engaging, they were at least baffling in their inventiveness. In the same vein as BEAUTIFUL YOU, FINDS YOU WELL’s employment of shuffling grooves feels like a cheap and obtrusive attempt to diverge from the aspects of Dylan Khotin-Foote’s work that found him an audience to begin with. [Ted Davis]
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