- Brooklyn synth pop newcomer Laurel Halo's first EP evinces the kind of tune sense you'd associate with the young Kate Bush, with a similarly windswept romanticism. Yet Halo buries things, sometimes completely: at her EP release show in Brooklyn recently, she used the microphone primarily to thank us for coming. Instead of songs we got blobs of often pretty and always busy sound.
King Felix is a different animal altogether. The words can be hard to make out a lot of the time—there's a lot of echo on this recording, for starters, and the mood seems to be more the thing than the narratives, per se. There's a real surge during "Metal Confection" when the dry, high synths start whirling and then Halo tops them with a billowing chorus that climaxes, "And she will never die-ie-ie." (The glacial drone of Oneohtrix Point Never's remix suggests that rather than death, she chose deep freeze.) She gets that kind of effect a few times here—the fast-stepping hook of "Embassy" has a slipperiness that matches its dazed and dazzled icy synth baubles; similarly, the arrangement of "Coriolis" is full of beguilingly flat-sounding synth tones—like approximated reed instruments—that grounds Halo's loop-de-loop melody. I'm intrigued to hear where she goes next.
Tracklist 01. Supersymmetry
02. Metal Confection
03. Embassy
04. Coriolis
05. Metal Confection (Oneohtrix Point Never Edit)