Emerging from the restrictive winter cold into the unpredictability of spring, it can be tempting to read a weather forecast like a horoscope. A brief glance at a row of temperatures and precipitation odds can send your mind running wild, soaring with hope at the suggestion of a sunny weekend day or plunging into despair at the thought of digging out that down jacket yet again. When you’re still emotionally digging your way out of the snow in March and the screen says it’s the bad number outside, your heart stops. Skim the tracklist of Loraine James’ Whatever the Weather and you might feel a similar reaction. In place of words or phrases, James has used only temperatures as titles. Such precise values might feel alien to ambient’s delicate dreaminess—it’s easy to project a series of highs and lows onto the journey before it’s had a chance to settle around your eardrums. But across these 11 tracks, James savors every opportunity to subvert the forecast, supercharging a balmy “17℃” with frenetic drumming, conjuring up a counterintuitively glacial synthesizer march for a beatless “36℃,” and letting the frigid “0℃” stand in for the record’s most danceable groove.
Such misdirection is hardly surprising for James, a genre-busting musician whose excellent 2021 album Reflection tore holes in the dancefloor large enough for the entire ’90s IDM scene to crawl through. Built from sessions that ran parallel to that album’s blisteringly funky experimentalism, along with lingering ideas unearthed from five-year-old project files, Whatever the Weather lightly tethers itself to ambient’s cool stylings, but the 26-year old also gracefully covers new ground; her experiments with improvisation lend this side project a lively, unpredictable edge. At every temperature, James finds a fresh inflection point, bending into the still-widening array of sonic identities at her disposal and shaking expectations loose.
Standout track “14℃” probes gently into this murky space. James pushes forward with a soulful piano melody, letting you feel the alternating drags and rushes in her playing as she explores its contours; she resists the impulse to explode it entirely, keeping the focus on searching vulnerability as glitched remnants of the keys linger and distort in the surrounding air. A few degrees below, on “10℃,” she turns up the aggression. Building from a single burbling electric-piano run into a whirling flurry of dissonance, James toys with space jazz, accompanying her own jagged reverb trails in a duet that bristles with frantic energy. For a producer whose records have tended toward tightly coordinated assaults on the senses, this looser posture suits her beautifully. Not quite demos but maintaining a similar sketch-like quality, these tracks feel like a rare chance to watch the gears of her mind turn in slow motion, uncovering the right notes in real time.
The skeletal quality of these improvisational stretches helps foreground the handful of moments in which James calls her well-honed instincts for dance rhythms into service. “17℃” comes close to rehashing Reflections’ grimy atmosphere, propelled by fluttering drums that smear against stuttered vocal cuts, but be prepared to wave a long goodbye when James cuts hard into a misty sample: The beats here mostly exist to shuttle you between Whatever the Weather’s ethereal scenes with a dash of low-end grit. The ghostly R&B of “0℃” grinds around clattering drums and a chirping synth hook, content to bump along in reflective bliss, while “4℃”’s submerged breaks never quite come up for air, preferring to lurk beneath a dense soup of fuzzy synths and pitched-up vocals. The dark nightclub ambience never quite dissolves—it’s still bumping through the walls—but here James soundtracks the haven of a chillout room.
In unpacking her guiding influences, James often mentions the impact of math rock and Midwestern emo bands—particularly American Football, who she cites as a direct reference for Whatever the Weather’s vocal performances. While the album is light on 13/8 time signatures, it fully embraces their meditative navel-gazing in spirit and tone on “30℃,” where James’ vocals stretch into a Kinsella-like whine as trickling keys dance around a sprightly beat. Rumbling drums guide you away, but the lingering effect is clarifying and unnerving all at once, like waking from a dream with unexpected tears still drying on your face. Moments of jarring emotional displacement like these stretch across James’ brief but mesmerizing career, but Whatever the Weather dazzles by pulling you towards them with the gentle confidence of an outstretched hand.
