You can't keep a good narrative down: chillwave has been a reliable punchline the last couple of years even though most of its biggest targets have refused to cooperate. Toro Y Moi, Neon Indian, and Washed Out have all established themselves as career artists and made their 2011 LPs count in a major way, while their aesthetic bled into hip-hop by way of Clams Casino and cloud rap. Even genre godfather Ariel Pink is developing a new legacy by releasing some of the best songs of his life. It seems like only Memory Tapes, aka Dayve Hawk, failed to rise to the occasion, following up the excellent Seek Magic with Player Piano, a collection of wan indie rock that seemed like an attempt to backdoor a revival of his previous trad-alt band Hail Social.
But then again, as a 30-something father and music industry vet, he was an outlier among the Urban Outfitters set to begin with. And if there's any silver lining to Player Piano, it's that the prolific and hermetic Hawk is free to do whatever the hell he wants without expectations. Last year, he hinted at a batch of Black Sabbath-esque dirges. Which is certainly intriguing and also about a billion miles away from the meandering pop of Grace/Confusion.
The most immediately striking aspect of Memory Tapes' third proper LP is the tracklisting: It's only six songs long and the shortest cut is just shy of five minutes; nominal lead single "Sheila" clocks in at about eight and a half. This seems daunting until you remember Seek Magic had only eight songs and, besides his unquestionable peak "Bicycle", its strengths lay in lengthier dance-leaning numbers like "Stop Talking" and "Graphics". So Grace/Confusion is certainly not the pop record Player Piano was. Here, Hawk employs a watercolor palette to his benefit: Despite its unnerving chorus, "I watch you sleep," the first half of "Neighborhood Watch" is given to the sounds of bleary sunrises, loosely strummed acoustics, and distant harmonies. Likewise, the brisk and perky "Thru the Field" is "Bicycle"-gone-Tour de France, while the first half of "Sheila" unifies two prominent artistic memes by sounding like Tango in the Night dubbed onto VHS. That constitutes about half of Grace/Confusion, likely the "grace" part.
Hawke has called this record "messier" than his previous work. But with the exception of the strikingly distorted coda of "Neighborhood Watch" (maybe that's where the Sabbath fix went?), most of Grace/Confusion pads out past four minutes by establishing a foothold before softly pivoting towards a far less interesting destination. And the immersion demanded by Grace/Confusion is undermined by Hawk's drizzly production; as an avid remixer, you'd hope he would be more accommodating to some outside input or at least an upgrade in gear. The same tones and textures that worked for "Bicycle" or "Plain Material" are unnecessarily restrictive in a format that requires more depth and dynamic range. And while it casts a nice spell during the earliest hours when your day is either beginning or ending, lifestyle depending, it's ultimately interrupted by Hawk's proclivity for chintzy sound effects; the second half of "Thru the Field" trails off into a wheedling, harmonized guitar solo; "Neighborhood Watch" breaks its tense grind with overeager synth lines, and Hawk bisects "Sheila" with a garish laser beam like some sort of supervillain ploy.
While Grace/Confusion may lean too heavily on Hawk's production, it's a hair better than Player Piano. But it's hard to call it an "improvement" or "progression" considering it's hardly outside the scope of what Memory Tapes has done so far. In a sense his artistic trajectory seems to be working in reverse-- Seek Magic feels like it should be the culmination of what he's done separately on Player Piano and now Grace/Confusion, not the starting point. So it's hard to take Hawk at his word as he once again claims that his next record will sound nothing like Grace/Confusion; without some true commitment to a sonic reconfiguration, his gift/curse is that it'll probably still sound like something he's already done.
