Kadhim's totally hot album of the week #11
Oneohtrix Point Never – Replica – Software – 2011
My New Year’s Resolution was to stop using food metaphors in my writing, but as you will see, this album has left me a bit drunk and I’ve succumbed to the lurid appeal of Pot Noodle once again.
Broken resolutions aside, 2012 is still young and the green shoots of new albums are yet to appear. So I hope you will forgive me if albums from 2011 continue to appear for a week or two. Indeed, Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica [Spotify] is a release from November that certainly carries its weight into the New Year.
Replica is a 40-minute cacophony of a gazillion different and competing sounds from Brooklyn-based experimentalist Daniel Lopatin. Lyrics fear to tread in his ambient netherworld where pianos dash in and clash horns with chopped-up squeaks and run-down, exhausted beats.
I’ll be straightforward: it’s not something that you would expect to like. It’s deeply weird. At times there’s an almost-overwhelming urge to grab your speakers and shout, “this shouldn’t be working!”
But work it does. Despite the tongue-twisting diversity of flavours, this dish is a spectacularly enjoyable shock to the senses. When things get too hot, soft sea-like melodies soothe like a cool glass of milk. If it feels like things are getting a bit meek, Replica chucks a raft of chillies down your throat.
The overall effect is rather otherworldly. It feels oddly appropriate for the New Year: it’s very suggestive. The great variety of sounds rubbing shoulders on crowded tracks, or warily standing off from each other, leaving large Jamie xx-shaped gulfs between them, feel like a cipher of what’s to come in 2012. Like a mashup of ghostly tunes that are yet to be recorded.
So perhaps not the easiest album to start off the term with. I might have selected The Weeknd’s latest superficial mixtape, Echoes of Silence, except that I think it’s a cheap, one-dimensional knock off of Michael Jackson’s Dangerous (screw it, of MJ generally) and not worth anyone’s time. But given its fair chance, Replica will prove as satisfying as those 4am Pot Noodles, and without any of the shame...
If you’re upset at my gratuitous trolling of The Weeknd, tweet me @kadhimshubber to tell me why I totally don’t get it, and it’s like “all sexy and creepy and shit”. Alternatively tweet @0PN and ask him how many girls he’s pulled with the line, “The name’s Point Never, Oneohtrix Point Never”.
