... "Animaru" contains multitudes, being on the one hand as unpredictable and wild as its namesake would imply, and on another a carefully sonic opus.
Like the desert locales it conjures, which secretly teem with life beneath a vast canopy of sky, "RATHER BE ALONE" makes so much out of so little.
"Emergence," like its creators, is difficult to sum up in simple terms.
"Roll The Credits" makes an absolute monster of a groove out of what, upon closer inspection, turns out to be relatively few elements. ...That said, the sum of these parts is positively colossal, bounding forward with an unimpeachably soulful stride.
Receiving particular acclaim following the release of 2021's album Ignorance, The Weather Station has spent the intervening years refining a particular blend of indie, folk, and jazz, through to their newly released record Humanhood. "Mirror," the album's third track and most recent single, epitomizes that style, just as its accompanying video realizes it into a wider spectrum of the senses.
Propelled forward by a steady, demure drum groove and rounded out by silky-smooth bass licks and vibrant keys, the various elements of "Set Your Spirit Free" weave a light-as-air, jazz-style tapestry in which every individual thread feels like lead line unto itself, while remaining inherently laced to the others in service of the greater whole.
"I Like It I Like It" is a soulful, almost sinister little helping of R&B, built on a roiling, slinky beat and a positively seductive bassline and topped with luscious, chime-like keys, plus the occasional clarion-call synth. Both singers join in reverb-drenched harmony throughout, splitting the song's two primary verses between them before ending once more in perfect tandem.
With its stark, damning lyrical accusations and an arrestingly erratic groove - not to mention it's stunner of an act three twist - "Conceited" is a stormy portrait of a toxic love affair painted upon the canvas of its off-kilter and cleverly turbulent arrangement. It's also a brief and striking distillation of everything that makes its parent album - and Young's music in general - so compelling.
"Like I Say (I runaway)" is the sort of song that one thinks they've might have heard a million times, when in fact they've never heard it at all, in the same way that genius feels obvious in hindsight.
"Schedule I," much like its parent album, is an unadulterated expression of Norman Sann's sharp, consistently refreshing approach to the rap game. Even when tackling topics as well-documented in the genre sphere as attraction or popularity, Sann never falters in wielding language like a saber, with a keen command of wordplay refined to an acute edge.
While one hopes in light of it's rediscovery that somewhere, somehow there might still be more great music waiting to be found, buried in the annals of time. That said, should this indeed be the last word of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to time immemorial, then its a fitting, if quiet, one - no great Requiem Mass or seminal Opera Buffa, just one last little treat from one of the most effortlessly luminous musical imaginations in recorded history.
"Hymn to Virgil" mines elements from almost as many musical idioms as its source material did characters from classical myth. It evokes a cavernous yet dense atmosphere thick as an arboreal mist and heavy as six feet of soil, and from that fertile sonic ground springs something that sounds like indie folk gone dark pop gone movie score.