As White Rainbow, Portland's Adam Forkner was a darling of a time when indie rock was just beginning its dalliance with synth music. Records like 2007's Prism Of Eternal Now, with their makeshift rhythms, devotionally droning ambience, and spiralling melodies now feel lovably antiquated—listen back and you can hear Merriweather Post Pavilion in their bones. After a hiatus that lasted several years, White Rainbow returns with a self-released album, Thru.U, where he attempts to update his hippietastic sprawl with a more modern template and a newfound sense of irony. The result is a bizarre, occasionally confusing record of new age trap and psychedelic pop.
Funnily enough, "Batman Palace" picks up where his old material left off—sweeping melodies and iridescent synths—albeit juiced up with some jittery beats. Halfway between Washed Out and DJ Rashad, its half-sung, half-hummed melodies and blanketing synths have all the baked-afternoon complacency of someone who just discovered chillwave. From there it gets different. Where Forkner used to bury the heart of his songs in slowly unfolding drones, now everything is front-and-centre, shoved forward by the rhythms. "Killswitch" is an uplifting trap number with an almost cinematic breadth to it—imagine one of the more melodic old White Rainbow tracks and plug in some Lex Luger hi-hats to get an idea. If that sounds a bit silly to you, that's how it comes out on the record, too.
Often it seems like Forkner is grabbing at contemporary sounds around him to try and fix himself back into a niche—after all, four years off the market must make it hard to find your place again, especially in a world as fickle as electronic music. But his grasping is amateurish; on "Don't Wait", the drizzly synth lead clashes badly with the drums, while the centerpiece "Be the Dancer Be the Dreamer" sets itself up to be one of those epic White Rainbow corkers but ends up twiddling its thumbs between tip-toeing around and trying to break out into a bigger dance number, while Forkner's vocals fail to make much of an impression at all.
The album's second half slows down to a gentler place. "Plane 2 Sea" and "Only 4 Us" are bite-sized pop ditties with goofy vocals, and "Touchdown" is a lead-footed stomper with whiffs of the L.A. instrumental hip-hop scene. These tracks fare better than the experiments on the first half, but there's something inconsequential about them—it's almost like Forkner is joking around, an idea only reinforced by silly moments like the slapbass interlude "Cuban Egg". There's nothing wrong with artists taking themselves less seriously, but from an act who was responsible for emotional epics like "Warm Clicked Fruit", his particular brand of antidepressant is a hard one to swallow.
Thru.U is disappointingly slight for a comeback album, but it's also a relief, because there are glimmers of the old brilliance in there. It just feels like he's having trouble expressing them. After the faux-80s ballad "Terminator Failed", Forkner brings the album to a glorious finish with the lengthy "Screen Blind", which builds over seven minutes of ecstatic synthesizer. It's one of the few tracks on the LP that retains the scope of his old work, but it's brushed and bevelled with a distinctly modern brightness—a hopeful reminder of his past triumphs, and enough to convince you that maybe he just needs some time to get back on his feet.
