BY TOM MURPHY A SHORELINE DREAM – WHITELINED The songs on this seventh A Shoreline Dream album sound like Ryan Policky and Erik Jeffries mined through the ambient despair and melancholy of recent years to infuse the songwriting and production with a hopeful vitality. It certainly doesn’t hurt that Mark Gardener of Ride contributed his talents to three of the tracks, but the core songs turn the group’s beautiful ethereal melodies into something that pairs well with the physicality of its always robust rhythms and electronic and electric low end. The lyrics seem to trace a journey through low places of emotional desolation and a feeling of being out of place and lost expressed through gorgeously luminous flows of ambient sounds. But in the end, the record leaves you feeling like you can make it through a gauntlet of disappointments and setbacks with your heart and sense of self reinvigorated. FELIX FAST4WARD – BETWEEN SUN & MOON The deep sense of tranquility that permeates every track of the new Felix Fast4ward album is immediately striking even when the songs course into psychedelic dub passages. In aggregate the tracks link like a mystical radio broadcast. It’s probably best listened to, if possible, on a cassette or a continuous playlist because the flow of ideas and sounds hits like a continuum. One might compare this to Gonjasufi’s 2010 release A Sufi and a Killer of another record from that year in Flying Lotus’ epochal Cosmogramma. Except there is more of a neo-soul flavor here in the artist’s command of similarly fused aesthetics from the aforementioned to hip-hop and IDM production resulting in an entrancing listen beginning to end. No. 129
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