Justin Paul Vallesteros started out making guitar-centered, conventionally structured, and reverb-heavy music that’s most often described by some conflation of “bedroom pop” or “indie rock”. Similar to the majority of artists in that field, his Craft Spells project wouldn’t have stood a chance if it was evaluated by the standard metrics of pop and rock: melodic ingenuity, sonic innovation, whether or not it actually “rocks”. The main appeal of Craft Spells is how the music gives the listener an ability to parse the many subtle differences in the various states of being by one’s self—there’s the attractive aspects (solitary, lone) and the not-so-attractive (isolated, lonely). The former were covered by his 2011 debut Idle Labor, a solo record by necessity that dealt with crushes, dates, makeout sessions and of course, post-breakup recoiling. Influenced by Vallesteros’ admitted, unhealthy relationship with social media, Nausea unsurprisingly finds him erring towards the latter.
This is a peculiar result, as Craft Spells has left the proverbial bedroom, enlisting a real producer and becoming a real band, so the crude drum machines that often lent songs on Idle Labor a necessary, rigid structure are swapped out for acoustic percussion that allows these new ones the chance to swing, to shuffle, to approach something close to typical rock catharsis. Likewise, Vallesteros wrote the entirety of Nausea on piano, while the harsh, digital reverb is now soft and analog.
Nausea often sounds disembodied, as every instrument's given a glassy, shellacked quality. “Twirl” nearly achieves liftoff in its chorus before tapering off, lest it overheats and melts the surrounding coat. Nausea’s eerie sense of removal is most effective on the Elephant 6 reverie of “Komorebi”, which takes its title from a Japanese word that loosely translates to “when sunlight filters through the trees”. At its best, Nausea takes after “Komorebi” in evoking a feeling that doesn’t have an exact verbal equivalent while sounding anachronistic in a way that’s both unnerving and fascinating, like watching colorized black & white movie.
Elsewhere, the production and arrangements often have to compensate for the monochromatic songwriting. The conception of Nausea was delayed as Vallesteros battled writer’s block; after the release of 2012’s Gallery EP, the Stockton transplant became bored with guitar, intimidated by the Bay Area's focus on raw garage rock and hip-hop and paralyzed by his reliance on social media. These are topics that are ripe for exploration, of feeling displaced and connected at the same time.
And yet, while nearly every track on Nausea finds Vallesteros trying to grapple with these issues, he rarely wrenches out any insight or personal detail. Both plainspoken and vague, the lyrics of Nausea sound like the result of someone simply trying to overpower a mental deadlock. What's more, without the plug-and-play immediacy of Idle Labor, the limitations of Vallesteros’ abilities as a legit frontman are put into sharper relief. “Changing Faces” taps into the feline playfulness of Japanese Whispers-era Cure by all but stealing its hook from “Let’s Go to Bed”, but it’s overshadowed by a distracting, offbeat verse that just sounds like it could use a better vocal take. Meanwhile, if “First Snow” has the most instantly ingratiating melody, it’s because Vallesteros slightly reworks the one from Idle Labor’s “After the Moment”, his best song to date.
Just because melody and verve aren’t the primary considerations for music of this sort doesn’t mean those considerations fail to matter. In fact, those are often the exact things that allow artists to stand out; it’s not Vallesteros’ fault that he shares a label with Wild Nothing, who created a standard to which Nausea appears to have aspired. But whereas Jack Tatum sounded emboldened by his success and richer production values on Nocturne, Vallesteros retreats. There's evidence of his craftsmanship, like “Komorebi” and the muffled trip-hop outlier “If I Could”, which sound removed from the styles favored by his peers, and it's fitting: as you’d expect from a record whose title alludes to Vallesteros' reaction to Internet overload, he’d be well advised to get some fresh air.
