In 2009, the funk maestro Dâm-Funk released Toeachizown on Stones Throw, reinventing his career, and delivering a kick in the ass to a storied label that had floundered after the death of J Dilla in 2006. He also released an odd, anomalous single in the same year, "It's My Life," on the brand new label, Circle Star Records.
Six years later, Circle Star has returned and it's become easier to understand why it exists. In Our Vinyl Weighs a Ton, the documentary about Stones Throw, there's a period during which it seems that the label's founder, Peanut Butter Wolf, has completely lost his interest in hip-hop. As he starts flirting with glam rock, AM radio redux, and other, weirder stuff, the loyal fans of Stones Throw can't understand what's going on. "For all of us frickin' die-hard, hip-hop, b-boy type people, we were just a little confused," the Gaslamp Killer says of the period.
The siloed existence of Circle Star Records is an explicit effort to clear up that confusion. Its artists don't fit neatly into Stones Throw's traditional output, at least when it comes to genre. Alex Brettin, who performs as Mild High Club, is a good example; he's just released Timeline on Circle Star. It's a record full of psychedelic soft rock that draws strongly from White-album era Beatles and T-Rex, with swirls of '80s-indebted synthpop.
Like Dâm-Funk, Brettin is a musician's musician, whose bona fides, for those not familiar with his technical ability, are communicated by his associates: Wire, Ariel Pink, Mac DeMarco. Occasionally, there are strong echoes of Pink and DeMarco on Timeline but Brettin ends up sounding more like their tame cousin. As the artist name suggests with the word "mild," Timeline is largely missing those moments of heightened intensity that make an album memorable. There are nods to the Zombies and Jim Croce; it's uneventfully easy listening all the way through.
The most exciting tracks here have rougher reference points. The undergirding riff on "Rollercoaster Baby", brings out the Marc Bolan in Brettin, making for a slightly more charged experience. On "Undeniable", he confidently assumes the mantle of his psychedelic forebear, Arthur Lee with some fantastic, buzzing guitar work.
Spot the Influence can be a critic's shell game, a way to sort of triangulate a new artist without actually engaging with his or her work. But the fact that Brettin's many reference points are so obvious suggests a problem with the music of Mild High Club: the act's identity is so loose that listeners will have trouble ignoring its artistic antecedents. If this is musical pointillism, then the dots are just too big.
None of this comes as a total surprise. Peanut Butter Wolf has always had a huge admiration for oddball creatives with vast technical ability, and has never seemed concerned with originality, per se. His feeling appears to be that giving talented people room to record is enough; and maybe he's right. After all, nothing about Timeline is bad. It's a pretty strong release for a brand new imprint to build on. But if the same record were released from, say, Stones Throw, we might sigh, and chalk it up to another good-but-not-great album from a label that still hasn't quite figured out a unified new direction.
