Two young boys stare out from the cover of Double Youth, and only one of them is Roberto Carlos Lange. The New York-based, Florida-born producer/singer who goes by Helado Negro doesn't remember who the other one is. Face-painted and serious, they both seem to be taking a moment out of one of those perfect childhood days to oblige a parent's request for a keepsake. The cover of Lange's fourth LP is a photo of a photograph that he found unexpectedly in his parent's house; its tears, curls, and age spots are captured in full as part of the composition. Fittingly, Double Youth, the boldest and most intricate Helado Negro work to date, grapples with memory and its uncanny tendency to wear away despite our best intentions to preserve it.
Double Youth follows a trio of ambient, mood-based EPs, shifting emphasis to structure, motion, and beats. It's the first time that Lange's lyrics, which as always shift effortlessly between English and Spanish, aren't the most concrete feature in his music. Synth figures grind together like clockwork on "It's Our Game", which owes some of its playfulness to Jimmy Tamborello's work with the Postal Service and as Dntel. The bass line that tumbles through the song acts more as a counterpoint to Lange's phrasing than a part of the rhythm section, although the line between the beats and everything outside the beats here is a porous one. The 8/8 time signature becomes something for Lange to challenge, not submit to.
Later, "Myself On 2 U" entertains a Boards of Canada-esque flutter while gulps of analog synths and backing soprano map out the chords. The menacing "Triangulate" rides a bristling industrial bass whose ascending phrases seem to leer at Lange's layered chants. "We'll take our time/ And we'll crawl to you," he sings, as if extracting threats from the dissolving context of a dream. Throughout Double Youth, Lange's words follow dream logic rather than concrete narrative. He uses language not as a key to the album's core but as another texturizing element, rolling out commands that sound more natural in Spanish than they ever could in English: "llamame" ("call me"), "dejame" ("let me go"). On "Queriendo", he pronounces the Spanish equivalent to the album's title, "doble juventud", a phrase whose syllabic density gives it an inherent rhythm of its own.
The album's gentle hallucination crystallizes on lead single "I Krill You", a slowly unfolding suite with a patient melody at odds with its rapid techno pulse. Lange builds the song only to break away at its midpoint to a synthetic choral moment, leaping lucidly from the club to the cathedral. "It's a dream, a dream, a dream about you again," he repeats, calling to an unseen other with the sort of longing that usually only survives inside Arthur Russell albums. Spritzes of synth brass stand in for slashes of cello; the beats pile, but never overwhelm.
Double Youth plays as an exercise in reconciling forgotten artifacts with present memories, as anyone who's had the chance to rifle through their former possessions and discover evidence of a totally alien former self knows the uncanny feeling that's articulated so effectively on Helado Negro's latest. The album's title refers most transparently to the twin figures on its cover: two boys being young side by side. But it can also describe the shadows we leave for ourselves, the youth we remember crashing into the husks of youth we discover. Helado Negro animates that conflict, finding not resolution, but harmony in the gaps between selves.
