Oneohtrix Point Never – Nassau
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Replica should’ve been more impressive. Daniel Lopatin’s most recent album is no less concerned with nostalgia than his more overtly new wave Ford + Lopatin collaboration, but here he occasionally gets hung up on concept. He builds each track from a sample taken from a 1980s TV commercial, and the songs are admittedly remarkable as self-contained microcosms that play out with their own logic. But it isn’t enough to just pull each sample from the collective ether (read: YouTube), and he relies too heavily on vocal samples in certain spots. Whereas Machinedrum’s outstanding Room(s) uses sampled vox as enveloping call-and-response choirs, Lopatin’s fragments repeat to point of annoyance, ad nauseam. Queasiness is a big factor in a lot of leftfield electronic experimentalism this year (see Hype Williams and LA Vampires), and I’m a bit bummed that Lopatin abandoned that shared sense of slippery weirdness for this release, but there’s nothing wrong with a move toward a more quirky musicality in the vein of James Ferraro.
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Oneohtrix Point Never – Nassau [download] [buy from Mexican Summer]
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