CVLTVRE — NEW
While this may be "traditional" vaporwave, nevertheless it's thankfully free of much of the lazy long form sampling and detuned pop ephemera that came to blight the back end of the style's peak in the mid 2010s. That being said NEW still deals in the kind of queasy, lo-fi easy listening and corporate melodies that are the genre's signature. The difference here is that they are original compositions, aged and crafted in much the same way as groups like Boards of Canada and some of the artists associated with hauntology produce their work. Indeed comparisons to the acclaimed Edinburgh duo are not unwarranted as many of the album's melodic high points would sit well on early BOC records like Music Has the Right to Children.
Irony and appropriation are key facets of the vaporwave aesthetic, and on NEW we find them deployed in the dreamy samples drawn from advertisements for Bounty chocolate bars on Taste of Paradise and the ubiquitous Japanese dialogue drifting through Shiny Intelligence. These uses can easily sound trite or shallow, but the quality and authenticity of Stephen Malet's melodies means these songs never risk that fate. Indeed it's the melodic core that really makes this album shine. On songs like Tiles, Magazines or Ocean Plastic simple lounge tunes are transformed into somnambulistic waltzes fit for the sterile corporate dystopia in which many of us in the West live. But - and this is the trick with the best vaporwave - the dark melancholy implicit in these tunes, while evoking the shallow, the corporate, and ultimately a world of limited horizons dedicated to little else than compulsion, is also extremely listenable and disarming. This dual effect of corporate music aesthetics is something Richard Chartier has also been exploring with his Pinkcourtesyphone project.
There are a few curveballs included here too. Access includes a sample of what sounds like a radio phone-in with Michal Dorn (Worf on Star Trek the Next Generation) which adds a suitably melancholic geek dimension (particularly for those of us of a certain age) and marries beautifully with slow funk bass and new-age ambient pads. And finally the guest "vocal" from Arthur Reptilian (no idea either) on Dream Again is a lonely ballad marrying DJ Screw with early Sade to suitably mind bending effect. NEW distils everything that was interesting and radical in vaporwave, while adding a maturity and musical flare that suggests there is still a good deal of life left in it.