Weval - Weval
Pitchfork 80
Every once in awhile an electronic record comes along that is both so strong and so obviously appealing that it can’t help but end up in the hands of people who otherwise own no records from labels like Kompakt, Hyperdub or !K7. Think of The Knife’s Silent Shout in 2006, or Burial’s Untrue and Justice’s † in 2007. Beyond luck and timing, these kinds of releases are successful because they are not only masters of their genre and bring its best attributes to light, but also because they manage to be a lot of different things to different people. It’s uncommon for all of those factors to come into play at once, but with the new self-titled debut album by Weval, it’s easy to imagine how German techno mainstay Kompakt could have the next great crossover artist on their hands.
Weval is the work of Dutch friends Harm Coolen and Merijn Scholte Albers, who have been tinkering together in the studio since first meeting in 2010, Albers coming from a self-described background in trip-hop, and Coolen in house. They describe their creations as being part of no particular subgenre of electronic music but instead a “cumulation of music that inspires” them. These points alone probably explain a lot about why Weval’s music could appeal to audiences of many stripes.
From a very first listen to Weval, it becomes immediately easy to envision the record simultaneously functioning as a summer soundtrack to beach nights at Ibiza, windows-down empty road car drives, backyard BBQs, background ambiance at expensive NYC hotel rooftop bars or headphone music for late-night dog walks. It’s hard to single out highlights on an album whose excellence is partially connected to the phenomenal consistency of mood and feeling it provides, but even so, there are many noteworthy tracks on Weval. “The Battle” begins with a slow, propulsive beat that sounds either like live drums or a well-recorded imitation and a filtered synth refrain. Its assured confidence and its sampled vocal shine with a swagger that sets both the temperament and tone for the rest of the album.
The dryly recorded syncopated pitter-patter drumming underneath “I Don’t Need It” immediately recalls “Bloom” from Radiohead’s The King Of Limbs. Other influences on the record stand through more deferentially. Beginning with a Knight Rider bass, “Square People” is almost like a dark, vocal-less homage to Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence,” with a circulating return chord that gives the song a feeling like it could go on forever. And on the elegiac two-part suite “You Made It,” the warbling senescence of the intro and cooing background vocals recall Boards of Canada and Ulrich Schnauss.
For a record that maintains a constant sonic template, Weval’s peppering of vocals throughout are crucial to providing gentle tone tweaks that keep it interesting. While many tracks are driven by vocal samples by KW Toering, two of them feature actual singing throughout, “Ways to Go” and “Days.” Perhaps due to the Lana Del Rey ringer My Larsdotter on “Days,” it feels like the track most likely to work as a “crossover hit,” or at least the one most likely to inspire an actual “featuring Lana del Rey” collaboration in the near future.
Perhaps best of all are “You’re Mine” and “Just In Case.” The former builds an incredible skittering beat for a minute and a half over a wall of decayed synths that sound like the chirping bugs before finally giving way to the organ hook that carries the song. Coolen and Albers’s sense of pacing is impeccable, seemingly knowing exactly how long to tease each part for maximum effect before moving on to the next. It is perfectly sequenced, mysterious and moody. For a debut album, the fully-formed nature of their songwriting, sublime pacing and monolithically tasteful atmosphere is remarkable.
Mon Jun 20 05:00:00 GMT 2016Tiny Mix Tapes 70
WEVAL
WEVAL
[Kompakt; 2016]
Rating: 3.5/5
It’s already past me. A slipping pop, snappy synth following, a glint of an idea hidden in offbeats. WEVAL is a groovy body with no hard shapes, techno-edged funk cut to gourmet size by a fidgety editor. An impatient body, clutching at a chorus that never fully comes. WEVAL is synth pop aiming for the point and getting trapped in its own desires, wandering off a cliff into a self-possessed and overly finessed nu-funk, kinetic headphone music with an obsessive front and seemingly no end goal. Bulbous chords and breathy, double-tracked voices get sunk and resurface, start a round robin of interruptions as tightly mic’d percussion aligns for a sensitive bass music, and then the whole thing sidesteps the obvious route and folds in on itself. Deceptively melodic at first glance, this album is onset in its climbs of aimless emotion by a dissective bout of engaging diversions, adept studio tricks, and binaural drum fills that ultimately compose its true identity.
Duo Harm Coolen and Merjin Schotte have recorded a visceral but enticing approach to pop music, a warm, personal expression of psuedo-organic techno-pop that dodges monotony with carefully truncated time signatures and a playfully spry studio mix. This isn’t their first release, but it’s no doubt their best so far, a fully realized space of shimmering notes and subtle signs toward a masterful production and shared creative mindset of defying expectation. I feel this record move often at first toward beat music or The xx-style deep moods via some fixed chord structures, but it smartly preempts its own direction, nose-diving into one of many phase-distorted tantrums or ends as a perfect tease of potential before things get too self-satisfied or, frankly, human.
Where similar producers might feel inclined to elevate the rather unattached lyrics and dry melodic pull of the core “song,” WEVAL put forth a fairly simplistic concept on this album made nonetheless difficult to accomplish through the work required. They use their base loops as mantras to build on, smartly utilizing sound modulation to connect musical passages by relaying them through the appropriate psychedelic channels, maintaining an overall ethos and emotional spirit that’s impersonal to the moment but breeding potential in endless new diversions. This means a lot of careful coordination between voice and noise and nice gear and drums, and WEVAL is syncing these elements with an ease and shapelessness that seems unfair. Loops overlap on accident and fall into place; seemingly unambitious bars are undercut by cheeky polyphony; and a balance is struck between dispassionate techno and involved personal pop on a dime.
Strangely enough, it’s enough. I could move on “I Don’t Need It” for days, blasted phase and fluttering bass pulling me in and around a shuffling kick, still too short at six minutes with its forever resetting pleasure circuit. But it’s one face of many — there’s also “Days,” its lost singer and faint finger snaps a mystery to dissect; “The Battle” in its weirdly funky apprehension; the immensely walkable “You Made It” suite; and the pensive self-reflective closer “Years To Build.” If a self-titled really is about identity, then the closer’s notions of putting so much work into something stand clear: the duo has put a ton of sweat into making this thing shine like a polished stone, and the effort does not go unappreciated. The music contorts itself and decorates in just the right ways, completely owns its spaces and changing temper, alive with impossible movements for evolving pleasure-seekers.