As Com Truise, Los Angeles-transplanted producer Seth Haley uses a narrow palette, but it works on a remarkable variety of canvases. Early EPs such as 2010's Cyanide Sisters and 2011's Fairlight introduced a project devoted to spacey slow-funk synth excursions with a whiff of ’80s nostalgia— an approach Haley continued on Com Truise's 2011 fine debut LP, Galactic Melt, and 2013's rarities grab bag In Decay. Over the years, though, this "Com Truise sound" has seemed equally suited to remixes for pop stars like Charli XCX or Maroon 5 as well as for Ghostly International labelmate Tycho. PARTYNEXTDOOR even sampled Galactic Melt's "Hyperlips" for the highlight of the Drake protégé's self-titled 2013 debut.
Working with other artists gives Haley a vocal presence that can go in front of his cleanly designed backdrops. Plenty of instrumental or nearly instrumental music can dominate the foreground, of course, but listening to Com Truise often feels like listening to a movie or videogame score. Which makes sense: Haley has described these releases as "like a film score... from the mind" for a storyline involving the interplanetary journey of "the world's first synthetic/robotic astronaut." On Galactic Melt, samples of dating advice ("Brokendate") or orgasmic moans ("VHS Sex") served as additional entrypoints, and the standout on 2014's Wave 1 EP was a guest vocal turn that had Ford & Lopatin's Joel Ford sounding like a cyborg Scritti Politti ("Declination"). Follow-up EP Silicon Tare sounds once again like vintage Com Truise, but it would have benefited from having more of a focal point.
The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there's little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album. Most enticing, unsurprisingly, are the two tracks shared in advance: the drifting, jittery flicker of "Diffraction" and the languid sweeps of the title track. But opener "Sunspot," with its busy drum programming, and the subsequent "Forgive," punctuated by squeals of synth, are of a piece. The closest the EP comes to an outright failure is the draggy finale, "Du Zirconia," which at six minutes takes too long to shift from its high opening bleeps to its eventual midtempo groove. What's a shame is that these tracks do little to expand on their initial ideas, let alone do more than set a vague, unblinking mood for their ostensible subject, the robot astronaut on its voyage through space.
Artists whose work shifts only subtly between releases have some welcome precedents, this year alone including the likes of Julianna Barwick or the Field. What raises bigger questions about Com Truise is the durability of this particular sound. From the soul and funk records that became "disco" to the varied post-punk sounds later boiled down into "alternative," genres often have more to offer before they've become codified; the homebaked synth-funk of Neon Indian or Washed Out didn't really have a name in 2009's deadbeat summer, but popular opinion coalesced around the name "chillwave" by the time Com Truise came to embody many of that YouTube-retro style's basic points. With Neon Indian — Com Truise's former tourmate — recently resurgent, Lindstrøm mastering similar sounds from more of a disco angle, and Chromatics dutifully parceling out dusky gems every several months, how much room is there for ’80s-harking synthscapes?
