Thirtysomething Mutant Ninja Twiddler
Four albums into his catalog, it sounds like New York beatmaker Drew Lustman—the “DL” in FaltyDL—remains vehemently uncommitted to any one electronic subgenre. Rare is the artist who can pull that off and make a cohesive release, and to this point FaltyDL hasn’t been the guy to do it. His latest album, In the Wild, hits closer to that mark, but it switches out listeners’ frustration with an absolute absence of focus for a forced game of hopscotch to try to hit a few more defined points of it.
In the Wild finds kindred spirits in recent and relative giants of the game. We can hear in it the jazzy sprawl of Flying Lotus and the techno-mysticism of Oneohtrix Point Never, both appearing in a track like “Do Me.” It’s an album that unfurls in fits and starts; some long tracks manage to zip by while others, like the drumless groove of “Rolling,” earn highlight status even though they only tease you for seconds like the best/worst of Boards of Canada. None of this, however, prevents the inclusion on here of more than a few telegraphed moments as well.
It’s always a point of concern when an electro artist makes songs seemingly named for the sounds within. The metallic island-style drumming in “Greater Antilles 1” and gangsta voices in “Frontin’ ” come imbued with a sense of weakness, where themes have to be drilled into listeners even before the music starts. Further, an awful lot of this album strongly suggests the glitchy melodies of Four Tet or Pantha du Prince, including “New Haven” and the flamenco-touched “Dos Gardenias,” as well as acid jazz or trip-hop in “Ahead the Ship Sleeps” and “Some Jazz Shit.”
Yet unlike 2012’s Hardcourage, which is kind of overrated around these parts, In the Wild manages a stronger pulse because of—possibly in spite of—this familiarity. “Danger” echoes 1990s orchestral acid. “In the Shit” reaches back to that decade for hints of dense industrial dub, and “Heart & Soul” does the same for jungle. And throughout the album Lustman peppers clattering and decidedly non-ambient ambient tracks which feel wholly his own and in the present. The FaltyDL formula isn’t perfected yet, but there are signs it could be.
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