One half of Brit dub-rock duo The Big Pink (behind last year’s shouty hit “Dominos”), singer Milo Cordell is keeping the band’s momentum afloat with Tapes. A moody, glitchy 19 track series immersed in the slow, just-out-of-time, electronic patterns (those often suffixed “-gaze”) quickly emerging from home studios, both in and out of established music capitals, and kinda-definitely different from the more centerfield music the Big Pink create themselves.
Cohesion seeps through the hazy din emanating from Tapes; whether there’s a message or not, you can see what Cordell is trying to do here. More than just a collection of cool songs, Youtube-playlist worthy tracks, Tapes is an informal canvassing of less teen-y chillwave, music that’s soaked sound, studiously derelict and dense. Some might call it a soundtrack for drug-taking. Characterized by repetition, overwhelming waves of sound, layers upon layers of effects and blips, Tapes features work that’s, like, the cultural and musical ephemera of the everyday, funneled and jimmied into discernible songs with discernible patterns and rhythms. If you don’t understand it, at the very least, it’ll introduce you to (and there’s no other way to say this, but) epic radio killers like Sewn Leather’s “Smoke Ov The Pvnk” and Light Asylum’s “Shallow Tear.”
Less experimental than that description implies, Tapes also makes room for genre bigweights; dubstep killer Joker, electronic maestro Active Child, sonic spooks Gang Gang Dance, lo-fi wunderkinds The XX and Swedish musical illusionists jj. Covering wide territory, from the glitchy ambient of Actress to Salem’s grimy growls, Tapes is the perfect soundtrack to take you from pre-party, to the party, to the after-party.
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