In case you were wondering, Ardour still sounds immersively gorgeous three and a half years later. Teebs' debut had a way of flooding your ears with greenery, lush environments seeping out of speakers and making it feel like the ambient temperature was 68 degrees no matter where you were. As low-intensity and mellow as it was, the warped instrumenation and crackling undercurrents of static and accelerated-aging decay seemed immediately tactile, doing for your ears what a look up into sunlight filtered through a canopy of leaves does for your eyes. After the fatigue of the most endless-seeming winter in ages, a followup feels sorely needed.
And yet it seems like something's been lost in the intervening years, considering how concise and relatively unadventurous E S T A R A has turned out to be. Unadventurous in this case doesn't necessarily mean derivative, least of all derivative of himself; the departure from the sprawling warmth of Ardour into more straightforward beats is at least transitional. And it's not necessarily boring, either—it's appealingly pretty music that's still a bit too attention-getting to recede into the background. But this is one of those cases where little manages to stick after repeated listens: slow builds, subtle shifts and clever juxtapositions reward close listening, but it doesn't do much to actually pull listeners in.
Meeting the music more than halfway isn't that strenuous, thankfully, and the early advance singles are enough to get a sense of the album's strong points. Jonti collaboration “Holiday” has the neat trick of smearing and smothering its notes to the point that there's little distinction between where the melodic progressions end and the sustained drones begin, thickly layered walls of percussive melody and melodic percussion concocting a blurry haze for bird chirps and sun-bleached vocals to stream through. “View Point” is more upfront in its structure—a beat that sounds like a muted, underwater tabla, offset with distorted ringing-bell chords that oscillate between sharp chimes and dissipating waves—and, with its parallel senses of deep rhythm and medidative drone, does a lot to advance Teebs' strengths as someone who can put together a dance track with the nuance and delicacy of an ambient composition.
There are other moments of arresting beauty, like the bossa-tinged beat on Prefuse 73 collab “NY pt. 2” that pairs airy woodblock and heavy-elastic kicks with crystalline acoustic guitar notes, or the sustain-drenched keys that make “Piano Days”/”Piano Months” feel like Overlook Hotel muzak if the ghosts were more Miyazaki than Kubrick. But there are just as many songs that slip through your ears. “Shoouss Lullaby” is little more than windchimes over foot-dragging bass rumbles that eventually drag themselves out of bed to join a woozy-headed beat, and “SOTM” runs off the jittery momentum of a gathering-steam burble of rapidfire click-boom-cymbal percussion. But even at opposite ends of the energy-level spectrum, they're both too gauzy and vague to resonate much further than the last moment of fading reverb.
E S T A R A is almost hypnotic in its tendency to make each individual track blur itself into an indistinct piece of a loosely memorable whole, one with little impression actually retained even if it jumps from mood to mood. Melancholy, bucolic relaxation, and agitated giddiness all run through this record, but its emotionally calming effect comes at the expense of anything truly revelatory or exciting. It's only when the clarinet of Jaga Jazzist's Lars Horntveth wafts its way into an almost snarky song- and album-ending moment at the conclusion of “Wavxxes”. There the sustained momentum finally all winds down in a flurry of missed notes and stray chuckles— the humanity finally piercing the surface. The mood is broken, the past 40 minutes vanish into the ether, and the loose sense of having just experiencing something fairly pleasant is all that's really left. Still, that elusive moment's worth trying to recapture with each listen.
