Lately, my “mellow mood” playlist keeps getting longer and longer. This has functioned as a great way to end my day. I don’t always want to feel sad or excited. Sometimes I wish to just zone out completely.
Actually, one thing I’ve experienced a lot recently is the phenomenon of sad music making me feel at peace with the world. I’m not depressed, but I am a sentimental guy. When I was younger, it didn’t take a lot for certain songs to make me feel all the feels, as the kids say. Yet lately, perhaps as a coping mechanism, I find a lot of sad music soothing and peaceful. I’m not exactly sure if I would qualify Laucan’s “Frames Per Second” as a sad album, but it certainly isn’t upbeat.
Laucan embraces a kind of emotional cinematic folk introduced to me by Bon Iver and gives it his own spin. “I Want Out” is the most “peppy” part of the album thus far, accentuated by some cello, which nearly always seems to be a welcome addition to a song. “In Between,” in contrast, is a minimalistic song that, in spite of it’s sparse-ness, communicates a sense of almost futility. The subject of the song is singing out into emptiness. The echo is beautiful, though. The instrumental title track counters the sparseness of “In Between” with a warm optimism that I really dig. It’s that sort of earthy dreamy vibe that I really, really dig. Once we get to “Miss Mistiness” the guitar tones are bringing my mind into the territory of Turnover a little bit. The sound is teetering on shoegaze, while remaining planted in that earlier cinematic folk territory I mentioned earlier.
My initial impression of the record is that it’s fresh and needed in my music library. It’s too saturated with indie rock and dream pop at the moment. I can already tell that the instrumental title track will be a contender for a top 25 favorite track of mine at the end of the year.
Whenever a publicist describes a record as “gorgeous” in a press release I pay a little closer attention. In the case of Laucan, I’m glad I did.
-Ryan Getz
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/326556406″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]
0 Comments