Move to Pain, the debut solo album by Josh Eustis of defunct Chicago laptop duo Telefon Tel Aviv, had a gestation that was long and landmarked by tragedy. Eustis started using the name Sons of Magdalene in 2007 after his father contracted cancer, then recorded some of the record's songs not long before his musical partner Charlie Cooper died suddenly in 2009. Eustis finished the album in 2010 and put it on the shelf until now. Perhaps unfairly, this backstory sets up expectations for a certain kind of record—an emotionally bared and demonstratively tormented one where the artist emerges transfigured by grief.
But while listening to the music featured on Move to Pain without context, you'd never guess at the circumstances surrounding its conception, as it sublimates misfortune into distantly sad wisps of retro electro-pop and church-stern interludes. Created while Eustis was learning to work without his longtime partner, Move to Pain sounds understandably tentative and cautious; taking his former band's sound to unaccustomedly poppy places, it's agreeable but innocuous. Dreamy dance-pop, driving atmospheric ligature, and threads of sinuously clipped IDM, with 808-style claps and blocky arp bass slathered everywhere, are all blended into one simple, unassuming consistency.
Telefon Tel Aviv traded in chill, jazzy electronic music with lots of samples, glitches, clicks, and cuts. At best, they cobbled tough, supple rhythms and fine, gummy tones into shuddering structures that felt bulky but delicately detailed—sonic objects you could feel in your ribcage as well as abstractly admire. At worst, they could be numbingly polite, like something sleek but ignorable you’d half-hear in a coffee shop, and the featured vocals often sounded dreary. Those inconsistencies also hold true for Sons of Magdalene; the best tracks balance the formidable and the fragile, making sub-bass fluctuations and slanted sequences feel blown up under a microscope. "Crows on the Eaves of My Father's House" is a particularly compelling look, with gulping vocal cut-ups that recall Andy Stott's "Numb". But that close focus slips on the more traditional songs, which range from functional but unimaginative to almost rote.
As a singer, Eustis gets the job done without frills, but he seems hesitant about letting us hear his voice and lyrics. He claims the foreground in opening track "Hold On Hold Still for a Second", maneuvering a pretty, watery melody through a rubbery sheath of thrumming arps, drilling claps, and plunging synth toms. He scores his most mobile and charismatic vocal performance on "A Strange Sound", a sea breeze of electro-pop (rendered just slightly strange by the skippy pitches in the harmonies) that builds to a rewarding Panda Bear-like conclusion. Less successful is his stab at a louche electro style on the haunted dub of "The Whip", which lands somewhere between Matthew Dear and Trans Am. But more often, we can barely hear him, as on his timid dance-diva take on the title track or his shy coloring of the oily bass music braid "O Death".
Move to Pain is most noticably held back by its rudimentary tones and structures, which are surprising from someone who's proven capable at cultivating complexity and detail. The songs either crescendo like opening funnels or orbit through sequenced arpeggios, contrasting counterpoint and drifting harmonies with dead-predictable dynamics. In either case, they feel overly straight and preordained, not taking us very far from beginning to end.
The music is simple, but not enough to be sublime; it's active, but not enough to find transcendence. And it doesn't render commonplace technology personal and alive—there's not much here that a savvy amateur couldn't do with GarageBand, a low bar to clear when grid-based composition with soft synths is so accessible. The results that Move to Pain yields are pleasantly neutral, with nothing going spectacularly right or wrong.
