To call Body Pill Anthony Naples' debut album should probably come with a big fat caveat: its eight tracks only amount to 29 minutes' total running time, and two of its cuts are just a sketch-like two minutes long. But who cares when the record holds together this well? It feels like an album, which, in the post-format day and age, is the only guideline that matters. And it certainly doesn't feel like a debut—at least, not in the sense of baby steps or half-measures. The New York electronic musician's vision is fully formed here, and it's original enough for him to stand out from the scads of producers trying similar hybrids of house, techno, and beat-up home-listening fare.
That confidence is all the more striking given that Naples is a relative newcomer. He put out his first record in 2012, on Mister Saturday Night, the label arm of a popular New York party series. Strikingly, "Mad Disrespect" was the first song he had ever completed—not bad at all, given how effortlessly it flitted between the cut-up soul of artists like Andrés and the slightly off-kilter vibe of artists like Four Tet and Caribou in dancefloor mode. Since then, he's recorded a handful of singles and EPs that have built upon the foundation established by his debut. They've all tended towards snapping house rhythms marked by flayed hi-hats and nervous, syncopated kick drums; he's fond of chopped-up keys and copious overdrive. Equal parts sweet and gruff, his club tracks are typically as juicy as a bruised blood orange.
But Body Pill, despite the title, swerves away from the club. Its opening track, "Ris", opens with two minutes of beatless drones, and the drums-and-synth figure that rises up out of the fog sounds less like dance music than a Casiotone reconstruction of the opening bars of Sonic Youth's "Teen Age Riot". "Abrazo", which follows, is a proper club track (even if that 3:25 running time may send DJs scrambling to come up with a follow-up before it fades out); its keening string loops and keyboard counterpoints are clearly in the vein of Pépé Bradock or Andrés, and it employs some of the toughest, most declarative drums on the whole record. Still, it doesn't take long to see that Naples' idea of dance music is a little bit different from the norm. The drums are sort of lumpy and disheveled; the hi-hat is turned up a hair too loud, and the snare sticks out like a broken front tooth. All that roughness is a way of balancing out the melancholy strings, but it also highlights the way even the strings are a little bit raw, their fidelity rough and their waveform crudely truncated; if this were a visual collage, there'd be Scotch tape visible over the corners of the picture.
The closing track, "Miles", seems like it'll be another of the record's go-to dancefloor cuts, given its overlapping layers of drum machine and sampled percussion and its eyes-closed deep house vibes; it rings like a lawn sprinkler aimed at a gamelan ensemble. But then a curious thing happens: shortly before the three-minute marker, it fades out, the tempo shifts from 120 to 110 beats per minute, and we're ushered out with tapped hi-hats and a tentative, burbling melody, as though someone had stepped on the hose. The rest of the album proceeds along similar lines, in which club-music convention is tweaked ever so slightly, its tropes repurposed for squirrelier aims. "Changes" balances absent-minded keys—a tinkly little up-and-down melody, an unbroken chord—with a cutting machine beat that spins idly in place, throwing off sparks. It's tough and drowsy all at once, and so is "Refugio", its tarnished counterpoints sounding like a conversation between two lonely robots. Most producers tend to visualize packed dancefloors when they're writing music, but I suspect this one was made with an empty room in mind, given the way its melody scoots like an idle gobo pattern across buffed hardwood. The only club-oriented track here that doesn't work so well is "Used to Be", which swathes swaggering, dubstep-inspired bass and drums in rosy Twin Peaks chords. It's not bad, but it feels aimless—even though, ironically, it's one of the record's most clearly defined tracks.
Perhaps he's simply better at abstraction. The drum-free, two-minute "Pale" sounds even more like a '70s public-television soundtrack cue than Boards of Canada's music does; "Way Stone", with its tight ripples of delay, might be sourced from rocks skipped across a still lake. Its wooden lead sounds like a kalimba wrapped in layers of sticky masking tape; at the short track's end, there's a rush of white noise like a seashell being held up to the ear. It's not terribly hard to make music that signifies varying shades of melancholy or unease; "moody" seems to be the default setting in dance music these days, from the underground to the main stage. But Body Pill is different: it's moody, but in a way that feels like he's not entirely clear about what the underlying mood really is. And there's an honesty to that. It sounds less like a young producer enjoying the fruits of quick success than a restless experimenter figuring out what to do next. Lucky for us, the woodshed is destination enough.
