You don't have to listen very closely to tell that Gang Colours' debut album is a Brownswood album through-and-through. Composed of soft vocals, grand piano, and subtle electronic elements, it's a dead ringer for Gilles Peterson's label's typical sound. What makes Will Ozanne slightly different is that he takes away both the usual acid-jazz and soul undertones and replaces them with a stone-faced funereality that brings him closer to James Blake than anything else. In fact, given Ozanne's remarkable vocal similarity to Blake, it's easy to see The Keychain Collection as a sort of alternate-universe James Blake, a collection of half-written piano chamber-pop trifles, only without all the defiantly fucked electronic manipulation.
Opener "Heavy Petting" lays it all out nicely: pitched-down vocal samples, gently submerging basslines, artificial percussion, and various gasps of silvery synth map out a backdrop behind Ozanne's breathy whispers. It has all the low-end physicality of bass music, but it's meted out with the care and caution of cocktail-lounge fare, a paradoxical combination that both endows Keychain Collection with a sort of languid torpor but also raises it above just another album of chillout electronica. He does get more assertive occasionally: The wildly panning, crushed-frequency drums on "To Repel Ghosts" add much-needed grit to the wandering piano, while the sonorous *Plans-*era Death Cab-isms of "Pebble Dash" are saved by woozy chords and strange bleeping noises.
Keychain Collection is primarily a record built on those little details: A casual perusal reveals some distantly pretty piano melodies, but listen closer and something like "Tissues & Fivers" is an elegant watercolor of textural intricacy and contrast, turning that single piano motif into something dynamic and transformative, while "I Don't Want You Calling" throws raucous Pearson Sound-like drum machine samples onto a plaintive backing track, erecting a twisting rhythmic skeleton out of pretty much nothing.
Even if it's hard to escape how much Ozanne sounds like James Blake on the vocal tracks, it's this sort of intimate exactitude of production that separates him from his ostensible peer. Normally a perfectly trained ear breeds stuffiness and rigidity, but here it works in Ozanne's favor. "Fancy Restaurant" is built around a single, endlessly repeated vocal phrase, constructed from all the same elements as the rest of the album-- brushed drums and flinty synths-- but Ozanne's gorgeous piano melody tumbles through the gauntlet of electronic noises gracefully, like water trickling down a knotted cliff face. It's the album's most addictive song and one of its unashamedly simplest, proving that even if Gang Colours can be reduced to a formula, it's at the least a highly enjoyable one.
The Keychain Collection is the kind of album likely to be eaten up by the sort of casual electronic music fan who devours the rest of the Brownswood catalog. Let's be honest with ourselves: This is pretty much coffee-shop fare. But it's smart, clever coffee-shop fare, with enough substance and and detail to stand on its own two feet, however dainty they might be. It's not a record that's going to hit you over the head-- it's almost fatally unassuming and more likely to meekly ask if you maybe wanted to spare a few seconds to listen-- but it's one that will offer a surprising amount of replay value if you accept its coy, hesitant invitation.
