Rob McAndrews, a.k.a. Airhead, is best known for collaborating with James Blake, which will do as much to foster an audience for his own albums as it will threaten to overshadow them. Like Blake (and his associates in Mount Kimbie), McAndrews makes low-key electronic music that never lets you forget the human presence behind it. In Blake's case, it's his ghostly pillow talk; in McAndrews', it's delicately plucked guitars, grainy field recordings, and a naturalistic sense of drift more akin to ambient music than techno. Portions of his debut, For Years, sound like crosstalk coming in from an open window; others appear to be happening under a pile of leaves.
The album is rooted in the hip-hop mosaics of producers like J Dilla and a subdued take on post-rock. At first it might be hard to figure out what the two styles have to do with each other, and if nothing else For Years connects them as dots in a constellation of instrumental music that favors abstract forms while clinging to an almost classical sense of beauty and grandeur. (The same qualities make duly clear its popularity among stoners.)
Aside from the mid-album exclamation point "Pyramid Lake", For Years doesn't beg for attention. It is downtempo music, subtle but paradoxically best heard at a distance. Its highlights are tracks that become memorable after multiple listens but are just as easily tuned out: the Karen O-sampling "Wait", "Autumn", and Blake collaboration "Knives", whose contorted gospel keyboard progressions are mixed under so much atmosphere they're practically subliminal.
In a recent Pitchfork interview, McAdams said that he spent a lot of time growing up listening to music while sitting in front of a computer, "which I'm sure [the music] wasn't intended for". Consciously or not, it's a relationship to sound that has seeped completely into For Years, which has an even-keel, almost analgesic quality when played in the background of otherwise uneventful moments.
It takes skill to make music this way-- to exist without disturbing, to engage without interrupting, and to please without sounding like you're going out of your way to do it. But there are tracks on For Years that feel like 30-second ideas stretched to four minutes, or where the music becomes so airy and loose I wonder if even McAdams is convinced it absolutely needs to exist. Ironically, what drew me to For Years on first listen is what held me back on the tenth: Despite its clever syntheses, there are times when it's not much more than pretty.
But the good is not only good, it's promising. Some of For Years was recorded as early as 2009, and McAndrews expressed no interest in changing how he makes music in order to keep so-called pace with his peers. That's noble. His earliest singles-- "Paper Street" and the Blake collaborations "Pembroke" and "Lock in the Lion"-- still have an isolated, thrillingly idiosyncratic sound, like blueprints for buildings that nobody ever got around to. Think of For Years as a brick.
