Tornado Wallace - Lonely Planet

Pitchfork 72

Like a lot of electronic music around the turn of the current decade, Tornado Wallace’s early releases sought a middle path between house and disco. Dissatisfied with dance music’s status quo, they toyed with slower tempos and hypnotic repetitions. Taking inspiration from acts like Metro Area, the Australian producer reverse-engineered his way through his influences, using a variety of ’80s and ’90s signifiers—laser zaps, glassy handclaps, Italo basslines—as stepping stones to time-travel across decades.

His music has consistently gotten spacier and more diffuse, wreathing layered hand percussion in woozy synths and nature sound effects like seagulls and crickets. The approach and the sounds are both straight out of the Balearic textbook, but his new mini-album, the seven-track Lonely Planet, is his most fully realized work yet, and also his most original. Bookended by a pair of gentle, ambient-leaning cuts, the record mostly ignores the dancefloor in favor of resting pulses and humid atmospheres.

Even at its most driven, the music remains deeply, imperturbably chill. In “Kingdom Animalia,” loons—the unofficial mascots of Balearic house—jibber contentedly over starry-eyed arpeggios and pitter-pat percussion that seems always to be building toward a climax that refuses to come. The whole thing just circles in place at a comfortable andante tempo, like an Escher staircase carved out of jungle palms. “Warp Odyssey” works in a similar way, and while the drums are fuller and richer, it never really kicks off in earnest; a cozy, slightly weary vibe sets the tone. Synth pads flicker like the steady pulse of sunlight filtered through bridge cables, evoking morning-after cab rides home, and a horn-like lead suggests Jon Hassell’s “Fourth World” jazz.

A faint air of sonic déjà vu only contributes to the music’s captivating mixture of the familiar and the strange. On “Trance Encounters,” Wallace tips his hat to the ringing guitars and muscular drumming of Dif Juz, an instrumental rock quartet that was signed to 4AD in the mid ’80s. “Today,” one of the record’s highlights, invokes still more mostly forgotten acts from that decade: There’s a hint of Propaganda’s “Dream Within a Dream” in Sui Zhen’s monotone spoken-word delivery, and the larger-than-life guitars and drums suggest the big-budget studio sound of quasi-New Wave bands like the Fixx.

It all comes quietly to a head on “Voices,” with slowly swirling digital synths framed by colorful thumb piano plucks and cold, stiff LinnDrum thwacks, and shakuhachi flutes rising like morning mist. Everything, from the major-key chords to the synth patches, seems designed to evoke the sound of mid-’80s touchstones like Peter Gabriel’s So, the Cars’ Heartbeat City, and even Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A—just dubbed out and tropically flavored, in keeping with the candy-flipping mood of the Amnesia terrace when Alfredo Fiorito held court there. At the song’s climax, we even get a gooey keytar solo winkingly similar to Jan Hammer’s “Miami Vice” theme. That kind of detail is manna for record collectors, but Lonely Planet will be just as appealing to listeners who could care less about an insiders’ guide to Balearic disco. From its muggy opener to the closing dose of blissed-out G-funk, this short, sweet record covers plenty of ground while remaining cozily supine—a round-the-world journey undertaken from the comfort of your couch.