Lo-fi bedroom punk, chillwave, Balearic, Hipstamatic, Merriweather Post Pavilion, whatever—just about everything responsible for the indie zeitgeist at the turn of the decade craved a return to innocence. This is why nostalgia for that time feels doubly sad: it’s escapism into a time that was already escapist. The frothy, sugar-spun dance-pop of Barcelona quartet Delorean was emblematic of those years, as captured on Ayrton Senna EP and Subiza. Now that it's 2016, Delorean get with the times and give us a comedown album. I’m just not sure that was their intention.
It sure doesn’t sound like Muzik was meant to do say or do anything radically different than Delorean’s most recent output. Though the production and instrumentation is more purely electronic this time around, Delorean are exactly what they’ve been since their reinvention and breakthrough—a band that retained the earnestness and economy of their emo/indie-rock origins while writing with techno and house tools. Muzik continues to reduce their reliance on swirling ambience, a logical progression from 2013’s Apar, itself a sleeker, more streamlined rendering of Subiza’s screamadelia. And while Ekhi Lopetegi has long been a Ph.D candidate in philosophy, Delorean’s not what you would call lyrical. These are guided meditations on the universal subject matter you’d expect from music of this sort.
On the title track, Lopategi chants “Music’s got a hold on me/It’s shaking the ground where I am,” and it’s surprising that Delorean took this long to engage in this kind of time-honored meta exercise, paying tribute to the songs that made them fall in love with club culture and presumably adding to that canon. And yet, no Delorean single to this point has proven less capable of supporting this kind of sentiment, the synthesizers and percussion so wan and monochromatic, you’d think they were going for a coldwave rebrand.
You can’t call it minimalism when the arrangement tries to trigger the same physical and mental incapacitation as “Real Love” or “Infinite Desert”; it’s more like they’re following an involuntary austerity pledge. After confidently striking out from Delorean’s cocoon of reverb on Apar, Lopetegi has returned but the rest of the band hasn’t, giving Muzik a curiously unbalanced, deflated mix. This isn’t the “alone in the club” feeling captured in crossovers like the Streets’ “Blinded By the Lights”, Jamie xx’s “Loud Places” or dozens of Drake and Weeknd songs. This is the sound of arriving at the club too early and wondering if it’s going to be this dead all night.
That’s the enduring sensation of Muzik, of waiting for something to happen. You wait for some insight into how Delorean’s creative process has evolved over the past three years. “Push” is damn-near an homage to the Side-B deep cuts of Hot Chip’s The Warning and the pitch-shifted vocal overdubs that signify their most recent engagement with electronic music would’ve been dated on Apar. You wait for these breezy beats to build towards a rush, for the arrangements to build rather than cruise. Every song on Muzik is given a functional, imperative title and at a certain point, they all start to feel like placeholder names for stems meant for a subsequent remix, though even their frequent collaboration Pional can’t make an honest jam out of “Muzik.”
Maybe the saddest part about all of Muzik is the inevitability: “Summer of Love,” “Summer of Drugs,” “Deadbeat Summer,” none of it lasts, just more proof of “Endless Summer” as one of pop culture’s most pernicious myths. Even in Delorean’s best songs, the hooks saw this coming: “will we ever meet again?”, “I would never be the same again.” A primary principle of dance music is to live in the moment *because *it won’t last forever, rather than in spite of it. Muzik is what it sounds like when you realize the moment has already passed.
