Halfway through the opening track on Andras’ Joyful, a pipsqueak voice pops up over a squirrelly acid line and giddily rolling snare, repeating a single spoken word: “Honeybird.” It makes for a strange collision of sensations: On the one hand, nods to classic rave and ’90s trance; on the other, a term of endearment rendered as a cartoonish chirp, stripped of all context. Whatever the word is supposed to mean, if anything, is never made clear, but the effect of that Rosebud-like refrain is unmistakably tender and carefree. The Australian producer couldn’t have picked a better title for his album: Suffused in romantic piano flourishes, winsome synth leads, and drums that race like a teenaged heart, Joyful’s seven tracks pursue pure, unadulterated delight.
Andras, aka Melbourne’s Andrew Wilson, is a clever manipulator of both codes and emotions. Though he got his start making sample-based hip-hop, since 2012 he has teased the outlines of deep house, lo-fi electro-funk, and new-age ambient, using aliases like Andras Fox, A.R.T. Wilson, and House of Dad, and as part of the duo Wilson Tanner. His output has gotten increasingly cheeky and occasionally arcane: 2016’s House of Dad, a tribute to his plumber father, sampled the sound of a flushing toilet; 2018’s Help generated ambient sketches from YouTube bloopers and shock videos; last year’s Boom Boom was a bongo-driven critique of the way that portable audio colonizes public space.
Joyful is a simpler project. There are no big concepts, no grand themes beyond nostalgia for some of Wilson’s earliest epiphanies as a listener: Thirteen years old, listening to trance music in the backseat of his parents’ car as it crests a hill and the ocean appears in the distance. The keys are mostly major, the riffs fetching, the sense of possibility nearly boundless. Occasionally Wilson, a seasoned crate-digger, surfaces a scrap of something vintage—a warbly aria or keening violin—and works it into the mix, sprinkling on the crackle of worn vinyl like fairy dust. When there are voices, they are digitally sped up or otherwise manipulated, mantra-like repetitions familiar from motivational posters and Instagram captions, like “live forever” or “what I feel.” Somehow, he delivers these in a way that’s guileless, unironic; he could probably get away with “Hang in there, baby” without batting an eye.
Wilson being Wilson, he can’t resist a little mischief. In “Saga of Sweetheart,” the synthesizer is an uncanny hybrid of Roland keys and Appalachian banjo; the acid line in “River Red” sounds at first like an homage to Larry Heard’s “Sun Can’t Compare,” but it turns out also to have rural origins: In a fascinating interview in Record Culture magazine, Wilson reveals it to be a note-for-note rework of John Fahey’s “Sligo River Blues,” transposed to the TB-303. This kind of tomfoolery shouldn’t work—and yet it does; nothing about Joyful scans as gimmickry. Thanks to standouts like “Harf Green” and “Goggles,” Wilson’s wistful sentimentalism and bright-eyed cheer carry the day, taking the edge off his loopier instincts.
The latter is one of the most affecting pieces of dance music I’ve heard in a long while. Never mind the vestiges of dubstep squelch or the pitch-bent echoes of Eurodance; those restless tics are folded into a whole so sumptuous, so swoon-inducing, their kitsch quotient barely registers. The core of the song is a long, melancholy organ melody that feels strangely familiar, almost like a hymn; the tempo is several clicks faster than is customary for a song so bittersweet, which lends a welcome oomph to a track that might otherwise brood. Where most of Wilson’s ode to joy sinks into simple pleasures—a catchy acid line, a reassuring syllable—“Goggles” embraces the kind of grandeur that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever gazed in awe at the view from a moving vehicle, headphones tugging on their heartstrings.
Buy: Rough Trade
