On his debut album, 2013's Nostalchic, producer Stuart Howard (aka Lapalux) showed a strong affection for 1990s R&B. He sifted the era's body-rolling sensuality through computerized filters, piecing the threads into cryptic slow jams and bastardized dance tracks. His music, across Nostalchic and several EPs, thrives on a patchwork approach, a mismatched blend of glued-together tape strands, heavy drums, and warped vocals. It's wonky enough to fit alongside that of Brainfeeder label mates Daedelus and Gaslamp Killer, but it's distinguished by a cosmopolitan sophistication, conjuring images of pretty people in dark clubs, sipping mixed drinks in trendy clothes.
The producer establishes a more aquatic vibe throughout sophomore album Lustmore. The compositions are more straightforward than those on Nostalchic, merging saxophones and billowing synths with results resting somewhere between James Blake's sparsity and early 2000s neo-soul. "We Lost", in particular, resembles a Musiq Soulchild track—the instrumental is decidedly Soulquarian; the vocals are mostly indecipherable. "Whenever I think about the album I think about the bar scene in The Shining," Howard told FACT in January, speaking of Lustmore. "There's something about that strange, hallucinatory psychological madness that relates to the music." To that end, Lustmore doesn't really move; it lingers like dense fog until it slowly dissolves.
In a way, the disoriented mood better aligns with another Kubrick flick—1999's Eyes Wide Shut. But Lustmore suffers from a lack of coherence. Its various feint and detours feel purposeful, but the album buckles under the weight of Howard's ambition, leading to a leading to a disjointed listen. Sultry numbers like "U Never Know" and "Closure" fit into Howard's overall aesthetic, but the mix of straight-ahead singing and woozy ambience feels outdated and timid alongside the more fluid, strange "Sum Body" and "Midnight Peelers".
The guest singers aren’t filtered so heavily, which makes for an easier listen, yet the output feels staid compared with his previous offerings, where he achieved the right mix of airy and bizarre.Nostalchic was tough to get into, but there was a certain charm to Howard’s esoteric style that set him apart. Lustmore doesn’t feel honed in; it sounds like a vast collection of songs that never quite go anywhere. Much like The Shining, there’s no telling what you’ll get from one scene to the next on Lustmore, but it ultimately ends with a thud.
Howard shows flashes of ingenuity on Lustmore's "Don't Mean a Thing", the album's most realized offering. Here, Howard finds a nice groove and stays put, looping the vocals into sporadic bursts while forgoing the stilted patterns of other songs—namely "Push N' Spun" and "Make Money". On "1004", Howard builds a nice shape-shifting atmosphere; the track smoothly transitions into a spacey upbeat gem that punctuates the LP. Ultimately, though, it's tough to discern just what Lustmore aims to be. It's dubbed as a hypnagogic release, but in Howard's quest to explore the void between sleep and alertness, the album frequently veers off the path, leaving me to wonder if there were clear directions to begin with. Instead of a full movie, Lustmore is a collection of half-edited scenes that don't quite gel.
