The changes in a single Jason Urick track are gradual and sometimes imperceptible. But his musical development across records he's made for Thrill Jockey since his band Wzt Hearts broke up is clear. Husbands, from 2009, offered mostly thick drones, suggesting a digital take on Spacemen 3's further-out meditations. Dub-inflected loops lurked beneath the drones on 2010's Fussing & Fighting 12". Now, on his best effort yet, I Love You, Urick's dub obsessions have moved to the front of the room.
Urick hasn't abandoned drone-- layers of noise and columns of sound remain primary colors in his palette. But what sticks strongest in memory after I Love You flows through your ears are the hypnotic cycles of bass, beat, and melody. Think of drone as the light Urick shines on his loops, or the water he sprays on them: The sheen makes them glisten and thicken as they slowly gain texture, but they hold up through the noise, rarely burning out or washing away under the busy sonics.
The clearest and perhaps catchiest example is I Love You's middle track, "Ageless Isms". It opens with a reggae hook, which Urick douses in brittle screech, warps with wavy noise, and stretches with phases that seem to stop time. All of these moves make the song radiate, even as the original hook gets cut until it bleeds. By the end, that hook is no longer prominent, but its ghost persists like a shadow stretching past the horizon.
Such morphing is perhaps what Urick means when he explains how the album title (taken from a film about a man obsessed with a talking keychain that says "I love you" incessantly) became a personal mantra. "[I kept] running the phrase over and over in my head," he says in press materials, "until the words started to break down and render the phrase foreign again." Oddly, the album's most interesting piece, "Don't Digital", is its least repetitive. But the way Urick melts all his sounds together, and the hue of Eastern ritual they exude, gives the track a devout feel. It's cyclical in a way that suggests something primal, like the movement of tides or the rotation of the earth.
Which makes the cover image of I Love You-- the crystal-clear "Blue Marble" shot of the earth from space-- a bit obvious. But Urick seems uninterested in hiding ideas under ironic distance or opaque sonics. As complex and dense as these five songs can be, you can always hear everything going on. So even when he closes the record with his thickest cut, "Syndromes", there's a clear vision that's apparent long before his drones shrink down to a lone rhythm. Maybe that's what Urick means by I Love You-- he's too enamored of the sounds he gathers to lock them up in noise.
