It’s all blurring together. Ambient is emo now. Rap sounds like harsh noise. Drum’n’bass is basically bedroom pop. And Ben Bondy, who until now has primarily dealt in disorientingly dubby ambient music, has emerged with something resembling a singer/songwriter album, but not quite. Bondy, a New York/Berlin-based producer who’s made a name as part of the latter’s cozy Kwia collective, has built a sprawling body of work across a number of labels representing the bleary haze of the left-field electronic underground. West Mineral Ltd., 3XL, Motion Ward, Quiet Time—if they deal in grainy, dissociative soundscapes, Bondy has probably released something for them. Across his scattered releases and DJ sets, Bondy’s demonstrated a voracious, shapeshifting sense of taste, though he’s never put it on display quite as openly as he does on XO Salt Llif3. As its Uzi-quoting name implies, his latest is a referential grab bag of sounds clubby or otherwise, albeit reconfigured here into a confessional diary of gauzy, acoustic laptop pop.
This isn’t the first time Bondy has strolled on the indie or cloud rap side of the tracks, but nothing he’s released previously could prepare you for opening track “Bend,” with its tropical blend of amapiano log drumming, Alex G guitars, and Auto-Tuned sighs. Picking up the thread on the dembow-powered minimalist R&B of Organ Tapes and Palmistry, Bondy brings a lushness that stands apart from those artists’ MIDI-controller-and-a-mic ethos. The front half of XO Salt Llif3 shows off the producer’s touch: The Drainer shoegaze of “Dreamseed” picks up more and more distortion as it lurches along, while “Ur Ghost Is My Shadow” grows from a dejected Blunt-ian folk strummer into a trip-hop depression spiral, Bondy’s low growl balancing coarsely against Berlin singer Kissen’s soft vocals. Bondy treats his pop inspirations as just another piece of material to repurpose, a natural extension of his experimental collages.
XO Salt Llif3’s best moments are constantly shapeshifting, refusing to leave songs exactly where they started. The album fulfills that promise less as it goes on; the record’s back half largely settles into a mold of shimmering hypebeast emo, leaning a bit too heavily on Bondy’s underdeveloped songwriting to carry it over the finish line. “There Is a Place” and “Flood” slow their strums to the point of melodrama, while “Stunned Suddenly” drifts between passages of fingerpicked guitars and glitchy beats over its six and a half minutes, ultimately dragged down by Bondy’s endlessly repeated mantra, “You’re beautiful/You’re amazing/You’re driving me crazy.” “Bend” has a similarly featherlight hook (“Cause I love ya, ayy”), but surrounded by a more contrasting cocktail of sounds, it’s easier to hear his words as a simple complementary flavor.
A recent wave of artists is trying to forge a new kind of club-comedown-inflected songwriting, be it deer park’s splintering dream pop, untitled (halo)’s druggy shoegaze, or the quilted trip-hop of urika’s bedroom. Bondy may have seemed an unlikely candidate to throw his hat into this particular ring, but the more he channels his wide-ranging inspirations, the closer he gets to creating legitimately amorphous and unpredictable songs. When he’s transforming his nasally whisper on “Halfmoon” into a drawling croak for “Dreamseed,” or luxuriating in rich details like the fog of strings that drowns out “Ur Ghost Is My Shadow,” you can hear him trying to reimagine his typically mulching sound design toward a new, more vulnerable context. It’s a target he doesn’t always hit, but when he does, it’s fun to watch him adapting from one mode to the next, surrendering to the blur.
