I guess we’re in the thick of it. Nothing cements a compartmentalized music landscape better than the albums that follow at the heels of that landscape’s forebearers. While dubstep at large is off becoming a toothless, bass-flexing contest inside some swampy club every Tuesday or Thursday night in your home town, the aural foundations that birthed that term have immigrated and procreated. It’s managed rounds across the globe, making good friends with hip-hop producers in LA as well as finding a place in the static remnants of chillwave, reanimating and perhaps giving a more significant voice to those ideas outside of its doubled up scenesterism. It was slowed way the hell down to pick up the pieces of whatever people tried to pigeon hole Clams Casino as, and it made an internet pop star out of The Weeknd. Within all these disparate subgenres of modern electro, sonic themes have emerged and managed to make a splash in the hearts of more homegrown less-tied-to-a-style acts willing to make something fresh and new out of them, such as Balam Acab or Shlohmo.
So it’s telling that even these guys are starting to trickle down, and in the case of Sun Glitter’s beautiful debut EP Everything Could Be Fine, Balam Acab’s immediate influence is already becoming clear. It’s hard to listen to Everything Could Be Fine and not pick it apart as a third generation child of post-Los Angeles hip-hop weirdness, chillwave, dubstep, witchhouse, and on and on. It’s not wholly unfair to do so either as it’s so clearly indebted to a love of the sounds and production techniques these styles have passed on. There’s the off-the-grid drum patterns, sun smeared synths, pitched-down vocal samples, and even the album sleeve with its speckled sun spots and faded-photo filter screams of trodden ground. Yet the fact remains that Sun Glitters incorporates these things – without just chasing after them – with a certain amount of grace and beauty that’s perfectly worth investing in.
I’m going to mention Balam Acab again because the similarities between both artists sample styles are very obvious. The voices here tread along pitched-down melodies that explode out of repressed wonder in sudden bursts before settling back into down-beat emotionalism. But otherwise Sun Glitters drives his samples and bedroom synths with the locked in off-kilter hyper-compressed kick style of Los Angeles beat makers that manages to starkly punctuate the lofty reverberating samples and teeth-gritting bass synths.
The two standouts – or at least stand-aparts – on Everything Could Be Fine are “Softly and Slowly” and the title track, which both share a breaking of an otherwise sonic formula. “Softly and Slowly” features a crooning guest vocalist to drift along the throat-rumbling bass and woodblock percussion, which is an oddly affecting move next to the otherwise sample-heavy proceedings. “Everything Could Be Fine” is a dancey change of pace with a 4/4 kick stomping beneath a merry-go-round sample. They’re hardly radical shifts, but Sun Glitters shows he has more in store than gut punch percussion and warbling vocal samples.
Another artist I’d readily call a peer of Sun Glitters might be Holy Other, who tends toward London more than Los Angeles where Sun Glitters seems musically at home. They both share a certain nocturnal isolation trademarked by Burial. They also share a certain outlook in melding many immediately contemporary influences into defined atmospheres. It’s easy to see both of these artists finding a little more ground of which to call theirs as they’ve both proven with debut EPs in 2011. For now Everything Could Be Fine is an easily accessible and beautiful listen made up of elements very much representative of their time.
