Flume releases versatile new album, Palaces, this month
Under the alias Flume, Australian electronic musician and producer Harley Edward Streten, who started producing music in his early teens, has released worldwide hits such as “Never Be Like You” featuring Kai and “Say It” featuring Tove Lo. Flume’s latest album, Palaces, has just been released on May 20th and follows a similar style as the aforementioned hits. Additionally, this latest release features some new electronic sounds and musical techniques interwoven into the album.
The first track, “Highest Building,” featuring Oklou, is a sweet-sounding, moderately slow song with some metallic effects and an airy timbre on the vocals. The lyrics are quite sad, seemingly about following someone to a certain level of trust who ultimately could not be trusted.
“DHLC” brings a minimalistic techno style to house vibes. The synths used are mesmerizing, rippling like waves across the song. The asymmetric rhythms add depth to the son, and are fun to listen to. This song is an instrumental, but it still makes for a great jam.
For a bit of a musical pivot, the next song on the album, “I Can’t Tell,” which features LAUREL is a wistful house-sounding track at the beginning with some heavy rhythmic synths afterward. It’s sort of pop-y, but also works great for people who prefer their music a bit more intense.
“Get U” seems to have more of an experimental rhythmic style, starting with almost complete asymmetry; rhythms that are difficult to follow or define, but it soon morphs into a pretty organized set of sounds, adding some background synths and slight vocals for a nostalgic end to the song.
If one is looking for something poetic-sounding and beautiful, “Jasper’s Song” works perfectly. Although it is not completely acoustic, this track starts with a piano playing arpeggiated chords, but the song is distinguished by some distortion to the pitch. There are strings in the background, and it almost sounds like listening to an old radio where the station is being tuned a bit for clarity, in a good way.
Later track “Love Light” starts with a sample of some vocals and plays around with two main themes in the music. The whole piece is really mellow and vibey. The structure of the song is precise, and each section is easy to distinguish, but the song ends with a build that develops very smoothly from the first few sections.
After “Love Light” is a beautiful and ethereal-sounding song featuring Caroline Polachek called “Sirens.” The vocals sound like taking a choir and condensing it into one voice. Contrasting this lighter sound are heavy synths in Flume’s characteristic techno style. Metallic and asymmetrical, they complement the vocals amazingly.
The last song on the album is the title track, “Palaces,” featuring Damon Albarn. Starting off with birds chirping and a piano playing quiet chords underneath, and a single voice singing over top, this piece is a truly fantastic ending to a wonderful album. It sounds ethereal and majestic as the name implies. Flume adds some distortion after the intro which transforms the piece into a more electronic-sounding one towards the middle, and then the main lyrics come in, followed by a beat that makes this song into the dynamic house piece that it is.
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