Soft Hair - Soft Hair

Pitchfork 68

In a few short years, New Zealander Connan Mockasin has proven himself game for all manner of chameleonic collaboration. With just a few days in Marfa, Texas, he cooked up a little something with Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, wrote for and served as Charlotte Gainsbourg’s backing band, and apparently played around with Vince Staples and James Blake on a not-released project. But most tantalizing was a long alluded-to collaboration with Sam Dust, formerly of the British dance-punk Late of the Pier. For all of the rapidity of those other connections, Mockasin and Dust first began smushing together their weird Play-Doh pop songs back in 2009. Meaning that well before Mockasin proclaimed Forever Dolphin Love and busted out a FreekiLeaks slow jam and Dust’s band imploded, Soft Hair was slowly growing.

Hinted at seven years ago and many mixing delays later, Soft Hair finally appears. And for those tantalized/ perplexed at the thought at Mockasin’s creepy castrato set against the heavier, tweaked beats that Dust made as LA Priest will instead find him hewing much closer to the former’s sound. The soggy pretzel logic of Pod-era Ween informs songs like opener “Relaxed Lizard,” most pointedly with that band’s obsession with early Prince. It’s a good fit for Mockasin’s squeaky voice—which can twirl up to “Camille”-like heights without having to speed up the tape—but also for Dust, who can dip into Prince’s vibrato with conviction. “Lizard” almost passes as a helium-voiced sexy little number, until the come-on of “I’d love to fuck you” has to share space with the admission “when you find she’s seventeen” deflates the balloon completely.

The waterlogged skank of “Jealous Lies” is a drunken ditty that replicates the kind of lo-fi weirdness that everyone from Paul McCartney to Aphex Twin has doodled in their home studios. The slow rise and fall of distant ocean waves and flanged-out guitar lines keeps “Lying Has to Stop” from being any kind of conventional beach track. It’s slow bubble could be seductive, except for Connan’s discomfiting come-on “I like to watch you run/But I’ll never touch your bum.” Dust’s dramatic over-emoting on “In Love” sticks out, but it’s the croaked chorus of “in love with the Japanese girls/in love with the Chinese girls” that turns the song irredeemably creepy.

Every so often, the album strikes that tricky balance between queasy and cute. “Goood Sign” is strange and charming in equal measure, Arthur Russell mumblecore on downers, set atop a slo-mo ’80s Italo horror synth soundtrack. The drum machine may be set to ‘somnambulant’ on “Alive Without Medicine,” but it makes for a lazy groove that syncs well with Super Mario water world bloops. Dust finds a rubber boot beat midway through, only to have Mockasin’s voice break the spell and have the track resolutely meander off course. “l.i.v.” is a mild, languid closer, but it’s not hard to think that after seven years spent cooking, Soft Hair’s results come out half-baked.