If you haven’t been paying close attention to the last decade of work by Danish producer Tomas Barfod, you might find yourself stunned by his quiet prolificacy. Between his main gig as a drummer for off-kilter electro-pop trio WhoMadeWho, his partnership with compatriot Kasper Bjørke as straightforward house duo Filur, and his own burgeoning solo career, Barfod’s had a major hand in nearly a dozen full-lengths since 2000. He’s not showing any signs of slowing, either, with two releases due in the first quarter of 2014 alone: WhoMadeWho’s fifth album, Dreams (due out March 3 on the band’s own imprint), and his own Pulsing EP, which follows 2012’s solid debut solo LP Salton Sea.
Though it borrows Salton Sea’s structure of alternating vocal and instrumental tracks, Pulsing is a much leaner affair, running its course in a brisk eighteen minutes while the former stretches over an hour. Barfod has cut down on the individual bloat, too, his average runtime having shifted from over five minutes on Salton Sea to well under four minutes on Pulsing. This newfound concision is accompanied by a parallel increase in focus: where Barfod once delivered a survey glance at electronic music—floaty vocal electro-pop, playful house, meandering headphone fodder—he now sticks to a rigid dichotomy: sharp, finely sung pop in one hand, and moody instrumental cuts in the other. You get the sense that Barfod digested the disproportionate praise given to Salton Sea standouts like “November Skies” and “Don’t Understand” and decided to double down, directing all of his straightforward compositional energy into a pair of stunners and using his instrumental tracks as a repository for stranger ideas.
If there’s any legitimacy to that strategy, then it certainly paid off. Pulsing’s title track finds Barfod reuniting with Swedish vocalist Nina K, who guested on the aforementioned “November Skies” and one other selection from Salton Sea, and their partnership continues to bear fruit: “Pulsing” takes a churning polyrhythm and uses it to anchor a bittersweet, subtly sticky pop song. Barfod’s roots as a drummer snake through the song, presenting themselves in the way Nina crams impressive numbers of syllables into the verses with quasi-mechanistic precision; there’s a delicate balance between complexity and catchiness at play that belies Barfod’s talented hand for pace.
“Happy” isn’t quite as successful, but its bruised, downtempo melancholy is a neat change of pace from the brighter, glossier sound of “Pulsing.” The song’s relatively obscure guest and unlikely backstory overshadow its musical merits: Barfod met Eddie Chacon, of 90s R&B one-hit wonder Charles & Eddie, in an L.A. dollar store, and discovered their musical connection after a few drinks in a nearby bar. Chacon provided the lyrics to “Happy,” a reflection on the scores of his contemporaries who have passed away over the last few decades, and his contribution lends the song an emotional weight it would surely lack otherwise.
Pulsing’s instrumental tracks are a little more hit and miss. “Tea Cup” is the better of the two: it’s buzzy, flecked with guitar, and ripe with skittering layers of rhythm, like the best B-side from The King of Limbs you’ve never heard. Barfod clearly has the ability to inject some vitality into the kind of electro-rock hybrid that’s rarely pulled off well, and it would be fascinating to hear him delve deeper into that side of his potential on a future release. “Value of Feint” hews closer to his previous work, but lands in an anemic middle ground between grand instrumental balladry and chilled-out synth noodling that relegates it to secondary status on the EP.
While the remix of “Pulsing” by Boston producer J£zus Million that book-ends the EP doesn’t quite succeed on its own merits, it ultimately sheds more light on Barfod’s strengths as a producer through its failure. Million recasts the song as a ghostly, James Blake-ian electro-soul ballad, and though he knows his way around a pitch shifter, he robs “Pulsing” of the twisting rhythmic core that works as the heart of Barfod’s original. Perhaps it isn’t a surprise that a drummer by trade peaks as a producer when playing with rhythms, but Pulsing makes it clear that Barfod’s assessment of his own skills is right on target.
