Stephen Wilkinson knows a good thing when he hears it. The English multi-instrumentalist and electronic producer’s albums as Bibio usually draw on an acuity for curation rather than composition. He collects fine-grained sounds and moods from lightly dusted corners of music and mounts them in blurry exhibits with bespoke cultural histories. On his new EP, he curates himself, correctly identifying and expanding on the best thing about his last record.
The ’80s R&B homage “Why So Serious?” stood out on the day-glo pop pastiche A Mineral Love because of a charming guest spot by Olivier St. Louis (née Daysoul), a UK vocalist who previously appeared on tracks by Hudson Mohawke and Onra. Bibio’s settings are often distorted, as though smeared in memory, but this one was unusually period-perfect, with a guitar picking out spiky cursive in a breathy mix of synths and percussion, and a vocal line masking sex with tender concepts like devotion. It was a markedly simple look for a producer prone to bouts of electronic psychedelia.
On The Serious EP, Bibio and St. Louis concoct three new songs in the same style, and though not one is as effortlessly head-turning as the original, a pleasant froth is sustained throughout. The most striking is “Stress Me Out,” where a parched funk crunch elicits a restive performance from St. Louis, whose effects rely more on timing and inflection than natural timbre. The quieter storms of “Make Up” and “Night Falls”—an abandoned vocal from A Mineral Love with new custom-built music—are much flatter, briefly descending and dispersing with little development. They miss the loose, casual strut of their source, and the faint but pervasive remove typical of Bibio starts to creep in.
According to Wilkinson, he and St. Louis hung out at his country cottage but then made the EP over email, which may account for the lack of spontaneous interaction detectable in the tracks. Though the retro R&B style is timely, Bibio and St. Louis don’t modify it with hovering menace, like the Weeknd; or a political charge, like Blood Orange; or restrained anger, like Frank Ocean. Like the canned effervescence of the music, the emotions seem patched in from another time, neutralized by distance.
St. Louis’ lyrics here are more general than personal, let alone idiosyncratic. “Make Up” is dominated by bromides about how you’ve got to try to succeed, and so on. “Stress Me Out” is about what it feels like to be stressed out. It’s unabashedly light, limited, occasional fare. But it’s also a needed freshening up of an increasingly opaque discography. The title track is a keeper, and the prospect of Bibio providing his colorful instrumentals to other singers—albeit in a more thorough, ambitious, altogether more serious way—is an intriguing one.
