Because it stands, A. G. Cook dinner is considerably synonymous with the glittering way forward for experimental pop. From his revolutionary label PC Music to his collaborations with weirdo popheads and avant-garde oddballs (Charli XCX, Caroline Polachek), his unusual, shiny manufacturing has infiltrated the panorama of contemporary music. As a producer, he’s been a necessary adrenaline shot in trendy music: not solely re-energising a few of the biggest musicians of the twenty first century, but in addition inspiring the newest technology of British bands to burst their style bubbles to invent one thing contemporary.
On his newest launch – a warped 3-disk odyssey analyzing music’s ‘Previous’, ‘Current’ and ‘Future’ – Cook dinner spins us by means of bits of commercial (‘You Know Me’) earlier than injecting them with fast EDM beats (‘Prismatic’), sounding one thing like if 9 Inch Nails have been a campy europop group. He by no means settles in a single area. For each monitor you possibly can think about blacking out to in a weird underground membership, there’s a extra celestial one simply across the nook (‘Crescent Solar’), revealing layers of feelings in complicated sonic particulars. The enjoyment of Cook dinner’s musical output is his talent for scaling up tiny particulars – typically only a single stem – and exploiting and increasing it till it’s unrecognisable. It speaks to his love for the craft. It’s clear he’s obsessive about sound as a result of he needs to push it to absolute extremes.
Regardless of the ‘Britpop’ title, Cook dinner’s songwriting on ‘Current’ veers extra in direction of the sensibilities of midwest emo than boisterous pub rock. His signature dreamscapes nonetheless soften by means of his softer, acoustic melodies on tracks like ‘Serenade’ and the crooning riff of ‘Vastly’. The great thing about his work lies in his capacity to create one thing fully in contrast to the rest, but nonetheless it pulls from common experiences. Take a monitor like ‘Good To Meet You’ – a music about craving – or the twinkling ‘The Weave’, and see how he elevates these common feelings to ethereal heights.
His expertise for juxtaposing very actual emotional issues along with his hypnagogic sounds each pulls the sensation and the sound away from one another whereas conserving them certain collectively – grounded within the very actual world, solely to be twisted into one thing shiny and extra lovely, targeted on the tiny particulars that make up the way it feels to be an individual.
The album’s emotional apex is ‘With out’, a fragile ode to the late producer – and pal and collaborator of Cook dinner’s – SOPHIE. Of all 27, it’s probably the most conventional monitor; there’s no actual must make grief sound any weirder than it already feels. He honours her legacy by referencing the one ‘BIPP’. His vocals crawl throughout the sting of the music, barely audible: “I could make you are feeling, I could make you are feeling higher,”exposing the hollowness that goes hand in hand with devastating loss.
Cook dinner then enlightens us to his concepts on the way forward for pop: and it appears dazzling. It’s value trusting his perception, as a result of he’ll in all probability be the reference level for many of it. ‘Lucifer’ is an understated, but euphoric dance monitor that bubbles with pleasure. ‘Equine’ and ‘Emerald’ too, sign a pleasant pop future, although they each spiral in direction of totally different locations. Appears to be like like irrespective of which street he plans on taking us, it’s gonna be blindingly shiny.
Particulars
- Launch date: Might 10, 2024
- Document label: New Alias