When Sylvan Esso’s self-titled debut dropped in 2014, their electronic songcraft felt novel. It played like a triangulation of Tune-Yards’ digital playground-chants, Everything But the Girl’s soul-folk remixes, and the sing-song indie-pop of Feist, with whom vocalist Amelia Meath toured as backup singer and opener with her woodsy harmony trio Mountain Man. If Sylvan Esso once scanned as a fusion experiment, it now reflects the science of pop, indie or otherwise: idiosyncratic, beat-built, and prone to occasional mea-culpa cultural critiques (an electronic pop tradition from the get-go).
What’s always made the group special is Meath’s voice—a bit scuffed, faintly parched but lithe, playful and harmonically on-point, warmly human even when sonically distressed, which it often is. It’s a nice voice to be around, as a listener and, evidently, as an in-demand collaborator: Recently, she’s covered Mazzy Star with Gregory Alan Isakov and Broken Social Scene with Maggie Rogers; she also sung backup on Tyler Childers’ Snipe Hunter and Kevin Morby’s Little Wide Open.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Ow ∞ is an especially coherent Sylvan Esso album. Unsettled though it is, it boasts a clearer emotional arc than past sets and production that feels particularly fine-tuned, maybe the result of the four-year gap since No Rules Sandy. Per usual, those productions, built with co-pilot Nick Sanborn, give Meath’s voice space to shapeshift and work out its shit, which here seems to involve of-the-moment quandaries: How do you function in a hydrant-flow of current-event horrors? What action do you prioritize? What do you do with the rage? What constitutes self-care? If hedonism counts, when does it become self-abuse?
The questions aren’t answered conclusively, but they play out compellingly. And like every Sylvan Esso album, things orbit around a few perfectly-conceived songs. The lead track “Entertainment & Coca-Cola” is an amuse-bouche, its conflicted pledge-of-allegiance to pleasure winking perhaps at Jean-Luc Godard’s famous quote and the carbonated tropicália of Caetano Veloso’s “Alegria, Alegria.” Similarly, the single “Hot Slob” echoes the meta-pop of Sylvan Esso signature “Radio,” but with a different sound—au courant ’90s alt-rock redux with ’70s-glam guitar punctuation. Character-actor air-quotes frame the song’s self-destructive narrator, maybe the pop savant from “Radio” or another over-exposed striver struggling with mommy issues, trying to navigate life’s lures and snares with Live Through This and William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell as road maps. Better still is “Concrete Glen,” a trip-hop fantasia that flips Jónsi’s falsetto chorus from Sigur Ros’ “Svefn-g-englar” into a lustily hallucinogenic account of what sounds like an exceptionally bangin’ party.
Beatmaker Nick Sanborn—Meath’s partner in many things, including a discerning label, a studio, and a very nicely-curated North Carolina music festival—helps keep things kinetic, detailed, and purposeful. This is key: Sylvan Esso records often drag, albeit prettily, between pop epiphanies (see the near-spoken-word interlude “Ribbon” here). Propulsion comes subtly, often from ghost beats or evocative micro-samples. On “Back Again,” a shard of what sounds like the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” suggests both a clipped hand-drum hit and a corn-kernel popping, while Meath quotes the Shondells’ “Crimson and Clover” and noir jazz horns lean into a sideways melody.
