Leon Vynehall's music is an artful blend of punchy and plush. Since the British producer started putting out records, in 2012, his music has blended the tough, percussive energy of contemporary UK house music, with its muscled low end, with the rich harmonies of sample-centric producers in a continuum that stretches through Pal Joey, Moodymann, Pépé Bradock, and Four Tet. Stylistically, he hasn't changed much since his first singles. But while there's no shortage of electronic musicians who approach dance music as a form of collage, Vynehall has developed into a master craftsman. He's got a keen sense for tone color, and the way he mixes textures—blocky piano chords, silken disco strings, rounded horns—lends to an unusually tactile sensibility, like brushstrokes built up into thick waves and oily crusts.
Rojus continues in the vein of 2014's mini-LP Music for the Uninvited, but it boasts a bigger sound in almost every way, with more layers, bolder basslines, and harder-edged drums. With the exception of beatless opener "Beyond This," whose arpeggiated synth and sampled birdsong make for a breezy ambient aperitif, the record aims its sights squarely at the dancefloor, with bass and percussion pushed up in the mix and tempos locked between 118 and 124 BPM. Like Music for the Uninvited, which was inspired by the cassettes he listened to in his mother's car, Rojus is a loose sort of concept album, one that purports to compare the mating rituals of birds of paradise with the behavior of clubbers. (The title means "paradise" in Lithuanian; it comes from a book cover he serendipitously stumbled across around the same time as his epiphany regarding dancers and jungle fowl.)
The theme doesn't extend much further than the sampled caws and trills woven into a few tracks. Still, like his avian inspirations, who sometimes use tools to prep the patch of ground where they'll dance for potential mates, Vynehall proves a remarkably resourceful producer: Instead of limiting himself to a single drum machine, he avails himself of scads of percussion sounds sampled from a variety of sources—a choice that yields a vastly expanded palette of timbres and timing. "Paradisea," one of the record's standouts, boasts at least three different sampled snares and a panoply of differently treated hi-hats; its syncopated accents are typical of the record's highly elastic sense of swing. The effect is a dizzying array of textures and frequencies, about as easy to parse as a rainstorm.
Vynehall only stumbles when it comes to the uniformity of his songs. They all avail themselves of similar types of sounds, and they all develop in exactly the same way—by beginning with a particularly resonant set of loops and then progressively adding more layers. To create tension, he'll mute a handful of sounds throughout the breakdown and then bring them back for a reprise. But there are no choruses, no bridges, no unexpected left turns. And his sounds sit so well in the mix, there are really no surprises, either. A little dissonance would go a long way.
Despite sonic attributes meant to suggest roughness, rawness, and even risk—the distortion, the swing, the grit—the music remains fundamentally agreeable, polite, even a little safe. Even the wordless cry that goes soaring over the top of "Blush," meant to evoke a moment of total abandon, fits so well with all the other moving pieces that it provokes admiration for its craft more than it stirs, much less disturbs, the soul. It points you in the right direction, but it doesn't quite tip you over the edge.
In addition to its ornithological conceit, Rojus is supposed to represent the arc of a night out. But it doesn't quite manage: The music's intensity remains more or less constant from the second track on. A good nightclub should have nooks and crannies, hidden rooms, mysterious passageways; its layout should encourage all kinds of mystery and mischief. But as wonderfully appointed as Rojus is, it really offers just one vista: Once you're through its welcoming foyer, you know exactly where you're going to be and what you're going to hear until the doors close. As a set of tracks for DJs to pick from, Rojus offers plenty of potential. As a front-to-back listening experience, it's almost paradise—but not quite the album that it wants to be.
