ADR - Throat

Pitchfork 71

As half of Gatekeeper, Aaron David Ross produced dizzying, over-the-top synth experiments, full of conceptual knots. His 2015 solo release under the name ADR was similarly dense, an exploration of life within networks that mimicked the spiraling disjunct of online life. With THROAT, he delivers something more distilled. Maybe the most conventionally listenable release of his career, its smoother productions serve as subtler—even insidious—vehicles for his ideas about communication and mediation.

The conceptual twist here is that the album is composed of vocal samples, most scrubbed clean of any signifiers of human origin. Remembering this as you listen can be amusing, even creepy, and the overall effect is that of a futuristic gloss, each sourced note subsumed into a larger whole. Ross has built these abstract fragments into all-but-seamless collages that climb, flutter, and drop in accordance with the rules of pop songwriting, but what’s constructed here has no singular voice, no characters, no storytelling—indeed, no language, at least not in the traditional sense, though occasionally a voice will float out in an unintelligible lead. Still, these tracks brim with feeling, or feeling’s synthetic analog.

Where his previous work tended to assault the listener, here there’s a sense of being swept up or carried—a more elegant transaction, but still one that requires the listener to cede power. On opener “Every Node,” Ross weaves bubbly melodies into a hopeful chorus, developing into a sort of call-and-response over a whispered R&B beat; “Lost Ya” supplements a bassline full of chipper indifference with wistful pitched-up interludes. Musically, the effect isn’t so far off from the high-definition, high-anxiety likes of Holly Herndon, Katie Gately, or, dare I say, PC Music—music that strives to sound ultra-contemporary.

Especially within this focused palette, Ross’ hyper-detailed approach to composition comes into crystalline focus. As pop producers do, he’s plumbing and deploying an array of styles here, from classical choral arrangements to polyrhythms to, on “King David,” what sounds like a muddled take on the “Ha Dance” break. But he’s also a student of a certain breed of outsized radio-EDM; Jack Ü comes to mind. The implication is that while such music succeeds because of how intensely legible it feels, this belies a dangerous lack of genuine content to communicate.

Ross’s project might be dystopian at its core, revealing us to be floating a little too comfortably in the cybermuck that builds up invisibly between sender and receiver. But his choruses still speak, in their own strange and affecting ways—I think, for example, of the plaintive solemnity of “Advice,” or “Effort,” in which danceable ambivalence gives way to a sample that’s been blown out into a cathartic machine scream, not unlike something you’d hear in a Linkin Park song. The structures of communication twist and splinter, but we can still sense a constant longing.