- Last year's eponymous debut album by LA's Groundislava saw him carefully incorporating hip-hop stagger into gorgeous chiptune nuggets. It was the slightly hesitant and romanticized product of a nerdy kid who loved video games maybe a bit too much. But when I saw him play live earlier this year, even he seemed bitten by the omnipresent house bug; his set of sticky synth melodies was interrupted by bursts of snapping 4/4 patterns, the same kind that jut through second album Feel Me's highlight "TV Dream." The track represents in large part the new face of Jasper Patterson's project, with dreamy vocals from Clive Tanaka and a tropical twinkle that pulls his music from dungeon-crawling to precocious and exuberant.
The record as a whole doesn't harbour quite the same seismic shift in style, but Feel Me shows Groundislava applying his 8-bit wireframe to more assertive ideas either way. He's still got a penchant for lullabies, as on the two-part "Jasper's Song," but these melodies are delicate and complex, rather than the single-minded "classical for dummies" that I used to refer to his earlier work. He's become remarkably better at the stargazing thing too, raising his work above the purely ornamental. "Suicide Mission," with fellow LA vocalist Baths, grounds an astral flight with simple but agonizing lyrics that sear with teenage angst and boredom, and "Flooded" is a distorted ballad that feels like it's being eaten up by its own corrosive uncertainty.
It doesn't hurt that Patterson's synths sound less dinky and more persuasive than ever: the swelling strains of "Olympia 2011" are expressive beyond their means, portraying a simultaneous sadness and triumph you might not think possible from "video game synths." Feel Me still occasionally suffers from Patterson's own restraint, however. The gently flecked snares of "Cider" and the album's other hip-hop leaning tracks are too gentle and almost inert, while "Cool Party"—a humourous barebones dubstep send-up of Skrillex's "Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites" complete with "OH MY GOD!!" scream—feels completely out of place on such a romantic LP, even if its tremulous low-end is viscerally satisfying.
Feel Me is a definite step-up for an artist whose first work was promising if not steeped in its own gimmick, a pleasing but predictable formula that didn't seem to have much room for expansion. Here, he proves us wrong, incorporating more dance elements more human elements, and occasionally striking gold somewhere along the way—the choked gasps of Shlohmo collaboration "Bottle Service" are the album's most intriguing moment. And even when he settles for bronze on the less inspiring parts of Feel Me, his pixelated greener pastures are not such a bad place to be, pleasant and enjoyable even when they're merely innocuous.
Tracklist 01. Cider
02. Suicide Mission feat. Baths
03. Olympia 2011
04. TV Dream feat. Clive Tanaka
05. After Hours
06. Jasper's Song I
07. Cool Party
08. Flooded feat. Houses
09. Jasper's Song II
10. Living Under A Rock
11. Bottle Service feat. Shlohmo
12. Love Ribbon feat. Jake Weary