As long as it took for Brendan Angelides to find a scene to work in, it's taken nearly as long for him to sound comfortable in it. With a discography stretching back to the late '90s and a string of high-profile stopovers on some of the key destinations for abstract bass music—Planet Mu, Ninja Tune, Warp—Eskmo's career itself has been more enduring than any individual record he's put out. As someone who sounds more at ease testing his ideas than sticking with and building off a formula, he hasn't had the chance to define himself with a signature style.
Not that he hasn't had some highlights: 2003's Ascension and its glitched-up d'n'b, the sun-drenched prog-dubstep of '09 single "Hypercolor", and his oddly idyllic take on electro-house on 2012's Language made a career of constant digressions worth following. He may have tripped over his own ambitions a couple times, but at least something like 2010's self-titled exercise in jumbled bass pile-ups couldn't be called complacent—or definitive, for that matter. With his more recent work paring back the gloss and bloat of big-statement Eskmo, a turn to more open-spaced, modern-classical influenced compositions feels like a solid decision.
Angelides' ear for nuanced ambience comes to the forefront on SOL, an album inspired by the sun and his work with the Los Angeles composer collective Echo Society. Slow builds and minimal beats emerge into warm presences, even if the droning compositions do more to insinuate moods than induce them. Spending enough time with the opening one-two of the Burial-interlude-style "SpVce" and the slow-motion monolith of "Combustion" will do a lot to distract from the actual dearth of kicks and snares on this record. The midpoint peak, an eleven-minute stretch incorporating the tracks "Sol" and "The Light of One Thousand Furnaces", lets the drones and bass thrums sink in until they sound like chamber strings, building to the one big moment of intense, cathartic percussion on the record.
SOL has less gravity when it steers away from its majestic solar themes and tries to put its abstract sensations into words. Eskmo's vocals, while delicate, still feel intrusive. The mannered, show-offy crooning about "morning mist and firefly dust" over "Blue and Grey" and the vague, Mattel-Peter Gabriel cheapness of "Mind of War" break the mood, putting the focus more on an (not especially engaging) individual voice than the feeling of bigger-than-all-of-us cosmic heat the record's best moments invoke. At least it's just one of dozens of voices he's worked with over the years—he'll find plenty more before it's all said and done.
