In the past couple of years, chill has become ubiquitous, not just as a verb (“Netflix and chill”) but as adjective (the “chill bro”), prefix (chillstep, chilltrap), and even noun: Per SoundCloud hashtags, at least, “chill” has become a genre unto itself. Contra Moore’s Law and all the breakneck terrors of an accelerated age, chill has been elevated to something like a state of being: a lifestyle, a philosophy, a categorical imperative.
A whole musical scene has evolved to satisfy the urge to decelerate. But as the aforementioned chillstep and chilltrap (faded variants of dubstep and trap, if you hadn’t guessed) suggest, ironically enough, the chill scene, at least in electronic music, is inextricable from its main-stage, peak-hour EDM counterparts. It derives its power from super-sized subtlety, exaggerated gestures, a kind of weaponized softness; in its side-chained whoosh and billion-watt sparkle, it practically screams: YOU ARE VERY RELAXED NOW! (It seems not coincidental that the rise of chill has appeared alongside not just marijuana’s widespread legalization but also its lab-grown, gene-spliced, THC-boosted explosion in potency.)
Odesza may not be the biggest stars of this movement (that distinction probably falls to Australia’s Flume), but they’re close. If their YouTube stats are impressive—23 million views for 2014’s “Say My Name,” 14 million for “Sun Models”—their numbers on Spotify are just mind-boggling: More than 82 million plays for “Sun Models,” nearly as much for “Say My Name,” close to a third of a billion cumulative plays across their top 10 songs on the platform. Not bad for a couple of guys who started making music together just five years ago, shortly before graduating from Western Washington University.
The first Odesza album, 2012’s Summer’s Gone, offered a fairly innocuous contribution to the emerging chill canon, taking cues from Bonobo, Tycho, and Four Tet and smoothing them into a tantalizing array of chimes, feathery textures, and powdery drum hits. Two years later, In Return bathed in an even more opulent abalone glow; it also honed their pop instincts, fleshing out their usual ribbon-like strips of sampled vocals with chirpy guest turns that channeled the decade’s default pop-EDM vocal style into whimsical, helium-fueled shapes. It was original and meticulously produced, but it got cloying real fast, like chugging from an oversized hummingbird feeder.
Today, Odesza are a proper stadium act. In May, they did two sold-out nights at Colorado’s Red Rocks, complete with electric guitar, eight-person choreographed drum line, and visuals by in-house live creative director Luke Tanaka. The new album is accordingly ambitious; it wants to be a lot of things, trigger a lot of feelings. It’s full of billowing vocal harmonies and seismic rumble and turbo-charged trap beats; its default mode is a kind of eyes-closed beatitude, and every climax is but a stepping stone to a bigger climax. That it’s an album about desire is obvious; you can sense their anticipation at feeling that brass ring brushing beneath their fingertips.
After a ruminative introduction, the title track explodes with so much light and color that you half expect Animal Collective’s voices to come soaring through the flames. From there, A Moment Apart just keeps chasing bigger thrills, deeper colors, and more heartstring-tugging emotions across an hour-long set of bright-eyed electronic pop, pan-pipe trap, breakbeat soul, and slow-motion house. “Boy” is a gleaming trap/dubstep amalgam fitted out with a yearning vocal hook; “Meridian” flips cascading, exotic-sounding choral harmonies into a soundscape evocative of a CGI-enhanced rainforest flyover in IMAX. As they’ve beefed up their sound, though, Odesza have lost some of their uniqueness. “Higher Ground,” featuring Naomi Wild, borrows from Purity Ring’s Kevlar-coated twee; “Line of Sight,” featuring the singers WYNNE and Mansionair, is a moody, mid-tempo ballad reminiscent of the Chainsmokers’ “Closer,” right down to the wheezy, staccato keys.
It doesn’t help that their guest singers’ lyrics rarely scale heights comparable to the duo’s vertiginous waveforms. “I need you now/Gravity can’t hold us down/So just take me there/To higher ground,” sings Naomi Wild, hemmed in by the confines of her rhyming couplet; two songs later, WYNNE falls into the same moon-June-spoon-shaped rut: “I’m feeling in and out/I turn full circle round and round/So will you help me down/Come grab my hand for solid ground.” But those vague platitudes may be preferable to Leon Bridges’ verses on “Across the Room,” a cloying slow jam whose sappy, sexed-up gravitas brings to mind Dave Matthews Band’s “Crash Into Me.” The breakup song “Just a Memory” is less icky; Regina Spektor is a more convincing storyteller, but her soaring soprano coo feels better suited to a Disney theme song. Squeezing genuine emotion out of this music is about as likely as finding comfort snuggling with one of Jeff Koons’ balloon-dog sculptures.
It all comes to a head with the closing “Corners of the Earth”: Over diffuse choral harmonies, RY X does his best Justin Vernon impression, while swelling synths and pounding drums conjure M83 and Sigur Rós. As the song builds, you can practically see the fighter jets crisscrossing overhead, their fuselages kissed with the colors of the fireworks exploding around them. “Tonight we run/Through love we never knew/Our love to everyone/We love tonight for love,” he sings, tautologically; “We’re golden/We’re golden/We’re golden/We’re golden.” But the harder the band strive to reach sublimity, the more earthbound their music feels. It’s fitting that he should begin with “Tonight we run/We run into the sun”; the song, like the album, has Icarus’ charred fingerprints all over it.
