Realistic IX

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  2024 Top 20

  Adam Wood

  I believe it’s illegal to write notes on a shoegaze(-adjacent) record without invoking genre godfathers my bloody valentine. So there, I’ve done it. Certainly their influence is all over opener ‘Realistic (I’m Still Waiting)’: multiple layers of fuzzed-out guitar crashing over the listener in waves. It’s also felt on album-highlight ‘Souvenir’: a wending melody pinned to rigid, minimal percussion. Elsewhere things look more towards various stops on the ambient spectrum: ’Crucial Years’ plays like a heightened field recording in the vein of William Basinski; ‘Bleach’ is happy to give itself increasingly over to static.

  The album ends in a weird place, with penultimate track ‘Jealousy’ sounding more like an alternate take of ‘Souvenir’ than a distinct composition. And then album closer ‘AM / PM’ is the album’s most ambitious piece in scope if not in complexity: an experimentation with prolonging one melody’s rising and falling interplay with a consistent percussive loop.