Is Lucifer Peaking Lights' children's album? One song, "Beautiful Son", is apparently about Mikko, the baby born last year to duo Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes. And the child "sings" on another, "Lo Hi", mixing his gurgles with mom's soothing hums and dad's homemade synths. But Mikko's role in Lucifer highlights something that's been there all along. Built with simple loops and easily memorized hooks, Peaking Lights' music has always been kid-friendly. And they've always been smitten with repetition, like a toddler happy to watch an episode of "Yo Gabba Gabba!" over and over. If this Peaking Lights album is for kids, all of them are.
More interesting than whether youngsters will dig Lucifer is what that possibility says about Peaking Lights' Technicolor swirl of psych, synth-pop, reggae, and dub. Their approach taps into something childlike without sounding artificially crude or annoyingly naive. The way they spin together strands of cycling bass, pulsing keyboard, and reverberating voice echoes how kids are fascinated by things adults take for granted. In the process, Dunis and Coyes find energy in relaxation, vitality in letting things take their course. Maybe that's why a song as beatific and sun-staring as "Beautiful Son" seems to have a pumping heart, even though Coyes never injects it with a beat.
Still, this album is called Lucifer, so maybe don't bring it to your friend's baby shower. Coyes claims they picked that title because "it means 'Venus, bearer of light' and is the first sign of the sunrise." But it also hints at some darkness beneath the sunny exterior. The album opens with the rattling "Moonrise" and ends with the hazy "Morning Star", suggesting this journey happens at night. And things get murkier as the album approaches dawn. Later tracks such as the throbbing "Midnight (in the Valley of Shadows)" and the dense "Dream Beat" mimic earlier songs in structure, but conjure a foggier atmosphere, as sounds slowly blur and fuse into thicker layers.
Those denser moments evoke artists on the farther edge of dub-riding sound: High Places, Sun Araw, Gang Gang Dance, Excepter. On the poppier end, I can hear Stereolab, Tom Tom Club, even Blondie in Lucifer's bouncier jams. These comparisons aren't meant to degrade Peaking Lights' individuality, but enhance it, because none of the above straddle simplicity and complexity quite the way this pair does. When they mold melody into mantra on something like the ethereal "Cosmic Tides", they give off both a broad universality and an inimitable personality.
Perhaps that's where Peaking Lights' kid connection severs a bit. Where a child is personality in flux, this duo's musical character came out of the womb fully formed. Lucifer is just their third album, and yet it's unmistakably drenched in their specific brand of patience and calm. If that suggests stasis, well, maybe that's not such a bad thing. For me Lucifer nudges their sound forward, but even if it were just a repeat-- another great loop, so to speak-- Peaking Lights are still a long way from the bottom of their self-made musical well.
