- The Warp duo turn towards harder sounds with mixed results.
- Plaid's new album, Polymer, comes with an interactive web environment in which the user can play with alien blobs to loop individual elements from the LP's first single, "Maru." The unnatural shapes and surfaces draw attention to the album's title and the idea behind it: to explore the role artificial substances play in our lives. Polymers are a good representation for Plaid's music, which can sound as pristine as a piece of polyethylene fresh off the assembly line. Their tracks are uncanny and otherworldly, somewhere in the nether-realm between electronic and acoustic.
On Polymer, Ed Handley and Andy Turner emphasize the toughness of these synthetic qualities with a turn towards harder, dance floor-adjacent sounds. "Maru" is broken techno with heavy kick drums and shoulder-shuffling snares. Other tracks are less forgiving. "Recall" is all pounding drums that land with the mean crunch of hardcore techno, while "Drowned Sea" is built from spongy textures that recall the abstract materials used on the website and album artwork.
Polymer's best parts show a keen balance of emotional and technical qualities. Take the arpeggios on "Los," which run in a different time signature to the drums. It's a disorienting effect made more extraordinary by the unpredictable chord progressions. Tracks like "Los" also carry the warm, nostalgic glow that derailed their last few LPs. Polymer's darker moments help mitigate that issue—feelings of innocence and sentimentality are occasionally upturned by an even stronger sense of foreboding.
Still, Polymer gets soft roughly midway. Though it's striking to hear the gleam of plucked strings on songs like "Dancers" and "Nurula," the melodies are unconvincing, the arrangements toothless. As with their last album, The Digging Remedy, these songs plod along at a mid-tempo pace without ever really going anywhere. Like 2014's Reachy Prints, the music is pretty yet insubstantial. There are melodies and some grand gestures, but the lack of tension and dynamics makes Polymer feel empty.
The closer, "Praze," lifts the album out of its funk. It features glockenspiel, harpsichord and shimmering strums of guitar moulded into a delicate, almost baroque melody. That might sound mawkish, but the track swoons with the mystery and majesty of classy Plaid records like Double Figure and Spokes. Polymer could have used more of this.
Tracklist01. Meds Fade
02. Los
03. Maru
04. Ops
05. Drowned Sea
06. The Pale Moth
07. Dancers
08. Nurula
09. Recall
10. All To Get Her
11. Dust
12. Crown Shy
13. Praze