Sometimes you can tell a lot from the smallest details of a project. The suffix "ly" in the name "Earthly", for instance, nods subtly to how this pair of North Carolina noisemakers create music not necessarily of Earth but cobble together fragments from their terrestrial experience into a rough resemblance. The album title may account for the sheer amount of time ex-college roommates Edaan Brook and Brint Hansen have spent together, working through school, hanging out at home, writing songs, or just getting to know each other. You can hear that time in Days—the lifeblood of its tracks is an endless collection of samples that would've taken years to assemble, let alone arrange into music—and sense that close friendship, too. Look at the cover: two strange, colorful faces stare blankly, content to simply be in the same place.
But maybe that's all a bit too serious for music like this, because if nothing else, Days wants to have fun. Earthly finger paints with found sound, plays tag with sequencers, jumps rope with drum machines, seesaws with FX pedals, and pigs out on bubblegum melody. You can imagine sing-songy opener "RGB" as the theme for a CGI "Rugrats" reboot, or "Ice Cream"'s carnival bounce as a Cartoon Network interlude. One particularly exuberant track is straight-up called "Games", and though it wastes no time dropping PlayStation samples into its iridescent chords, the music plays like an anthem for indoor kids who discovered their kindred spirits at noise shows and dance parties. Days doesn't make you feel like a kid so much as it reminds you how great it can be to act like one.
Surrealist as they are, Brook and Hansen frequently dip into the uncanny valley, and it's where their best ideas are found. Not unlike Oneohtrix Point Never or Holly Herndon, vocals are chopped and pitched into tuneful glossolalia, occasionally allowed to speak in daffy non sequiturs. And it's often impossible to discern exactly what other sounds Earthly recorded, dismantled, and pieced back together for any given track. Was that a pan flute fluttering in the background of "Honison Climber"? Did they sample a soda commercial for "RGB"? You may want to pick apart the layers, but it's better to soak in the frenzy; all those moving parts would be nonsense on their own, but together amount to a baffling electronic spectacle.
It's unlikely you'll hear another album like Days this year, but it's not without predecessors. The influence of early aughts psych noise courses through the music, as if it's a love child conceived during the first Black Dice and Animal Collective tour. But the offspring has grown independently, learning to speak its own language with new slang and more deliberate syntax. The sound resembles fellow audio collagists in places—Javelin's playful No Mas, early Prefuse 73, Matmos, and the Books are all here. But throughout the record, Brook and Hansen discover new ways to surprise and thrill, making unexpected turns with each consecutive track. Even low-slung drifts and beatless shimmers aren't off limits in their topsy-turvy digital funhouse. Maybe "balanced noise album" is an oxymoron, but so is "adult playground." Indeed, Days is both.
