Joakim - Samurai

Pitchfork 72

For much of his career, the French producer/DJ Joakim has primed his audience for jarring stylistic switches. Scan his wide-ranging credit list: This is a man who has helped mix Cassius’ dance music as well as a tribute to atmospheric soundtrack master John Carpenter, who has reworked both Tiga’s lurid house and J.J. Cale’s adult contemporary. He’s covered William Onyeabor in addition to Neil Young. But despite Joakim’s mutability, the 40-year-old has always returned to a home base in the neighborhood of disco and rock on his recordings, grounding his capricious tendencies with a groove or a backbeat.

However, Joakim’s latest trick is to mostly abandon any expectation of straightforward dance-rock on Samurai. Some precedent for this could be cobbled together from his past albums’ subtler moments, which were occasionally overshadowed by overtly adrenaline-boosting tracks. These include the gurgling synth ramp-up “Chapter 1,” which kicked off 2014’s Tropics of Love, and especially “Peter Pan Over the Bronx,” “Palo Alto,” and “Tanabata,” three songs that defined the whimsical side of 2007’s Monsters & Silly Songs. Other clues about Samurai’s origins were provided by Joakim himself, who put together a Soundcloud mixtape of his influences, which he said “range from new age to yacht rock, from ’80s synth-based funk to Japanese electronic avant-garde, from krautrock to futuristic dystopian electronic music.”

Accordingly, the producer frequently avoids conventional song structures on Samurai. So don’t show up looking for the reassuring waves of most house or techno, or the comfort of verse-chorus-verse pop. There’s not much singing on the album, and the vocals are often hard to make out. This music is placid, uninterested in using speed as an easy gimmick to get your attention. Instead, dodges and destabilizations are common.

In “Mind Bent,” the synths level up slowly—imagine stretching and pulling Kool and the Gang’s “Summer Madness” to the consistency of taffy—and a long tail of drums clatters and knocks about. This builds suspense, but Joakim never delivers a payoff. “Cannibale Pastorale” is filled with blipping, chirping noises, like a pack of gossiping dolphins or chattering R2-D2s. These begin to acquire a beauty of their own after a while, but then Joakim interjects a crass barrage of drums, souring the song’s peaceful qualities.

Though Samurai can sometimes feel like an art-school exercise in unpredictability, the majority of the music is easy on the ears. And it never stays in one place for long, so anything grating soon passes you by. There are rivulets of watery saxophone, and a handful of cheerful, bass-popping funk riffs that could have introduced segments on a local news channel in the ’80s. There are claps of distant thunder, bird sounds, and genial, wildly unthreatening metallic noises that suggest wind chimes and dinner gongs. Freed from the desire to make people move, Joakim put together a record that’s unified in its oddity.