Some people are going to hate Roads & Boats. Much of the backlash against chillwave centered on the role that nostalgia played in those early efforts, and well, this guy is one that certainly deals heavily in that characteristic. Borrowing his name from a 1999 board game, and their album cover design from the famous shape of the NES cartridge, there’s no doubt that the enigma behind Roads & Boats (apparently named Adam) has heavily invested himself in the culture of the past. That might be enough to send some of you running for the hills already, but to ignore this producer on the basis of his aesthetic choices would be ill advised.
Much of Going Away comes across as sketches of songs rather than a final product. I’ll grant you that from the outset. There’s really nothing cohesively tying these works together, other than that they share some of the same cheesy synth sounds and lite-funk basslines, but man these tracks are fun. That sounds like a broad generalization, or even a flat out insult, but I mean it as about the highest compliment to an artist that’s still coming into his own as a producer. Despite the fact that these tracks still need a bit of polish, and certainly the work as a whole needs some cohesiveness, there’s no denying the infectiousness of tracks like the opener “Vision Quest.” Built on the sort of video game synth sounds that are present throughout the record, one can’t help but be reminded of Javelin, a duo that deals in similar nostalgia steeped tones.
Like Javelin’s No Mas, “Vision Quest” — and really this record as a whole — relies heavily on a few key samples and some catchy synth lines to provide a climate that is entirely danceable and really just plain fun. The vocal sample, from Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 film Silent Running, is yet another example of that lightheartedness that pervades the record. In the film, it isn’t a moment that could be necessarily termed “fun,” but recontextualized here, amidst these bouncy synths it becomes an uplifting moment much like the rest of the album turns out to be. “1-800,” too, is one of those sorts of tracks that just puts a cheesy smile on your face throughout. The rest of the tracks suffer from false starts. They’re built on the same principles as those first two tracks, but for some reason they don’t hit on the same level. They’re still good on paper, but they lack the special something that makes those first two tracks so exciting.
By all means, I should have been among the many that will ignore this album. The cover, the aesthetic, the use of the word “Chilltendo”; all of that rubs me the wrong way, but there’s some spark in this album that indicates that Roads & Boats might be onto something. It’s just plain fun, fun that at this point can’t sustain itself over the course of a full record, but fun nonetheless. It’ll certainly be interesting to see what comes our way once he starts firing on all cylinders.
