Historically, DJs have approached crossing over into the rock world like a military operation, loading up on firepower—i.e., random, WTF celebrity guests—for maximal in-the-red impact. It’s a strategy with which Adam Freeland is well familiar. While the veteran British beatmaker’s fondness for boisterous breaks always aligned him spiritually with arena-rattling rock—as manifest in his white-label remixes of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—over the past decade, that influence has become evermore explicit. After kicking off his 2005 Back to Mine comp with a Trail of Dead track, Freeland went all-out for his 2009 artist album, Cope, enlisting a veritable VH1 special of notorious noisemakers, including Tommy Lee, Marilyn Manson’s Twiggy Ramirez, Brody Dalle, the Pixies’ Joey Santiago, and Devo’s Jerry Casale. However, rather than join the likes of LCD Soundsystem and Justice in the indie-disco champagne room, Cope became something of an instant anachronism, a dance album reliant on rock-star cameos released at a time when dance producers were on the verge of becoming rock stars themselves.
Perhaps the cool reception to Cope has inspired Freeland to plot his current crossover move from an entirely different direction, concealing his identity within a collaborative project and deploying a sound that doesn’t so much thunderously rain down from above as seep up from the sewers. The Acid is a three-way union between Freeland, L.A. producer (and certified Ableton Live instructor) Steve Nalepa, and Ry Cuming, a.k.a. RY X, an Australian singer/songwriter (and one-time Sara Bareilles collaborator) in the moodily romantic Jeff Buckley/young Thom Yorke mold who scored a minor chart hit last year in Europe with the haunting ballad “Berlin.” (The D’Angelo-esque NSFW video probably helped.) As legend has it, the trio met a house party in Los Angeles last year, but the music they create together is better suited to the completely opposite scenario: insomnia-riddled nights spent tossing and turning in a windowless flat, with nothing to amuse yourself with but your most depraved fantasies and deepest regrets.
If Freeland’s Cope synthesized and streamlined the various strains of mid-2000s dancefloor-directed indie, The Acid’s debut full-length, Liminal, does the same for post-dubstep British rock: Portishead’s Third, the xx, The King of Limbs, James Blake. This Acid bears no hallucinogenic qualities, but rather slow-burn, corroding effects: songs that begin with a drip—snare-rim taps, synthetic handclaps, bass frequencies that throb like a merciless migraine—and eventually leave burn marks. But where the Acid’s immediate antecedents were attempting to push their songwriting to minimalist, brutalist extremes, Liminal is something of a recoil move back toward the realm of pop accessibility, an effort to extract warm blood from cold concrete and offset the bleak with some sleek. (Or, put another way, it’s a savvy reconstruction of sullen source material into potential sync-license gold.) **
Liminal may be unforgivingly austere in presentation, but it’s not without a desire to uplift—while Cuming doesn’t so much sing these 11 tracks as tremble through them, his bruised croon and spectral harmonies at least serve as flashlight-sized beacons to guide you through the album’s shadowy, greyscale terrain. The first words we hear him sing on Liminal are “I need your love”, and the songs that follow catalogue his various ploys to get it, from restraining-order-worthy lechery (the “Machine Gun”-loaded “Creeper”) to egomaniacal posturing (“Fame”—not a Bowie cover, but a similarly sardonic comment on starfuckery) to gentle reconciliation (the acoustic reprieve “Ra”). His is a deft highwire dance between serving as album’s emotional center and dissolving into a textural detail; by the end of the penultimate “Clean”, Cuming’s titular incantation has become the song’s click track.
But while Liminal is a testament to the Acid’s breadth of vision and production prowess—seamlessly incorporating everything from subterranean techno and avant-R&B to proggy sci-fi soundscapes and sad-bastard bedroom folk—its uniformly predictable pacing, with every song painstakingly built up from a pause to a pulse, grows wearing over a 51-minute stretch. Curiously, Liminal’s release was previewed by its most atypically lucid, palpably angst-ridden track, “Basic Instinct”, whose raw, distorted-guitar-driven climax is seemingly at odds with the meticulous mise-en-scenery in effect everywhere else on this record. But its late appearance here proves strategic: when, on the chorus, Cuming declares he’s “coming up for air,” it’s a welcome relief for our lungs as much as his.
