In spite of their best efforts, Young Magic managed to distinguish themselves from their peers in 2012. Considering the nondescript name, the album title of their debut Melt, and its smeared cover art, the duo of Isaac Emmanuel and Melati Malay appeared hellbent on confirming presumptions of them as another post-chillwave purveyor of amorphous, watercolor synth-and-sample ambience. Most of Melt turned out to be just that, except all that all tidal ebb and flow crested into huge, crashing singles “Night in the Ocean” and “You With Air”— the latter of which got a high-profile boost when Purity Ring interpolated it into “Grandloves” later that year on their hit LP Shrines. Their most accessible songs were the ones that made people take interest, and you'd think that wouldn't be lost on the duo. But on their new album Breathing Statues, they’re every bit as intent on blending in with the surrounding scenery instead of standing out. This time, they’re far more successful.
As with Melt, the intercontinental incubation period of Breathing Statues is the main talking point__—before finishing the album in New York, Young Magic recorded in places such as Morocco, France, and New Zealand. And yet, regardless of the passport stamps and frequent flier mileage the Aussie/Indonesian duo accumulated, Breathing Statues could've come from just about any MPC-masher who spent the past two years living in the Twittersphere. Similar to hundreds of likeminded acts with hazy sonics, hazy boundaries between “producer” and “band,” and a desire to still operate under the tag of “indie,” Young Magic’s taken a decidedly darker, more coldly minimal tack since 2012—__lurching bass, ice-grilled snares, and pitched down vocals help leech the fluorescent color out of the comparatively vibrant Melt. I’d imagine Yeezus got some serious run in their iPods.
But there's never a sense of the artistic process, development, or internal inspiration that went into Breathing Statues. The band's new tricks resemble updated software—patches being dragged and clicked onto a horizontal timeline. The woofer-blowing bass judder that opens “Cobra” makes for an intriguing start, but then Young Magic let the figure carry the entire four minutes by itself. A similar effect happens with “Foxglove”, which features the kind of vacuum-packed, freeze-dried synth tones that lets you know they’ve shared their colleagues' fixation on the idea of listening to Sade, or most likely, Rhye—but there’s no heat being generated underneath. Meanwhile, the screwed moans of “Mythnomer” are the only reminder that Emmanuel sorta-kinda rapped on Melt, and subsequently Breathing Statues could've used anything on that questionable element's level of generating tension with Malay’s airy, anonymous breath-sing.
Nothing here bears the strain of overzealous ambition, there are no flubbed notes, unseemly textures, unfortunate lyrical ideas; everything positive or negative about Breathing Statues is simply too ephemeral to make a fuss about. It's an album of which the main purpose is to take up space, whether it’s in a retail setting, as background in visually arresting videos, or as news fodder for content-hungry websites and as raw materials for their friends to remix. Even if I can’t imagine anyone outside those realms being excited about Breathing Statues, it completely justifies its existence as a record that aspires to exist as content.
