Alexis Taylor’s new album, Beautiful Thing, begins with a slightly muffled, boompty beat, part throbbing of the heart and part pounding of a speaker heard through a bathroom door. “I’m dreaming another life,” Taylor sings, his voice quavering sweetly. “Won’t you meet me out of your mind?”
Taylor has spent the last 15 years or so dreaming things up. As the lead singer of Hot Chip, he imagined working-class British versions of American R&B (their 2004 debut, Coming on Strong), disco abandon (2008’s “Ready for the Floor”), and ’90s diva house (2015’s “Need You Now”). Around and between those albums, Taylor formed the improvisatory trio About Group with members of This Heat and widescreen junglists Spring Heel Jack. As a solo artist, Taylor has variously fancied drones; amiable odes to old pros like Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren; and most recently a collection of straightforward piano-man twinklers.
Snatches of his discography waft throughout “Dreaming Another Life,” the opener to Taylor’s fourth solo album, as if before this dream he’d fallen asleep counting sleeves of his old records. It’s hypnotic but unsettled, stumbling from a warm passage of ambient house to loops of squalling noise to a glittering sheet of treated guitar. “The changes are hard to hear,” he sings, “but I know they hide in here/I’ll pull them together soon/Somewhere out of this thick air.”
The title track arrives like a thunderstorm through billowing curtains. Created, along with most of the album, in concert with DFA co-founder Tim Goldsworthy, “Beautiful Thing” boasts a bed of acid supporting unfurling swaths of noise, little winces of keyboards, and warm fluffy clouds of piano. “I try to reach you/But our love is undefined,” Taylor sighs, his voice caught in reverb. As with “Dreaming Another Life,” the song again and again starts to congeal, yet can’t quite become tangible. It’s the sound of Taylor caught in an irresistible haze, failing to slough away the sleepiness.
Taylor picks up the kind of shrugging boogie Christine McVie once put down for mid-album highlight “Oh Baby,” a kind of anxious paean to cohabitation. “There is nothing greater than the sight of you just dreaming free,” he sings as the chorus rises and falls, “and if I close my eyes I know that I will lose you when I wake.”
And so, for the rest of the album, he sort of decides not to, tossing and turning in the throes of sadder songs. “Deep Cut” is a kind of “Nightshift” for the unemployed; “Roll on Blank Tapes” is something like if the On-U Sound System attempted a sea chanty; “I Feel You” approaches the grace of Antony and the Johnson’s “You Are My Sister” or “Thank You for Your Love,” without the aura of trauma.
The layers of sound Taylor presents are sumptuous, full of tossed-off licks of piano and guitar that gather into motifs more deluxe than his recent solo work but far scruffier than Hot Chip. Tucked into them, Taylor’s lyrics make strange but welcome bedfellows. Often, he uses the language of music-making as a metaphor for connection. In the stately vocal showcase “A Hit Song,” he sings, “I need a high note/A moment to clear throats/Of all who have lost hope/And need a response.../And I know there is something left to lose/And high notes don’t always reach the truth.” There’s a catch in his voice like a dull sun through the blinds, capturing the moment of waking up and reaching out to find the pillow’s vacant after all.
