Flume - Skin

Pitchfork 64

The universe opened quickly for Flume, the 24-year-old Australian DJ/producer born Harley Edward Streten: his debut album topped the ARIA charts, Lorde and Disclosure enlisted him for remixes, and mud-caked crowds have strained to glimpse him at Coachella and Lollapalooza. And with that rise, he’s become something of a dance music Rorschach test: either he’s posited as mainstream electropop’s next great hope, or he deepens the frowns of those fatigued by rave culture ubiquity and personifies all that is frivolous about it. (The Guardian recently brushed him aside with, “Oh, great! Just what the world has been waiting for,” a pessimism that leans toward the Woody Allen school of astronomy.) It’s no wonder, on his second album, Flume says he aimed to write a track that sounds “like the fabric of the universe tearing ”—all that weight was cramping his shoulders.

Skin, the record in question, aims for that level of grandiosity throughout. It’s a stadium-sized upsell of Flume’s prior atmospheric formula—skittish beats that cleave easily to gruff rappers and R&B sopranos alike, rattling future-bass warp, undulating synths—that swells with energy but spills over edges. Here, Flume recruits an array of famous guests (Beck, Little Dragon, Vince Staples, Raekwon, AlunaGeorge), padding their radio-friendly cuts with the persistent crescendos of his self-titled debut, then ballasting them with loose instrumental interludes. The sum suggests that he’s an earnest collaborator, flashier but still casting around for a distinct identity.

Flume has a fondness for female voices singing in their upper register. On his first album, that role was played by Jezzabell Doran on the album’s best cut (“Sleepless”). Here, it’s handled twofold by Aluna Francis of AlunaGeorge (the groggy, glitchy “Innocence”) and also Kučka, a young Aussie singer who distinctly echoes Francis in slinky R&B phrasing and tinny topnotes. The halting, futurist beat of Kučka’s solo track (“Numb & Getting Colder”) nods to Flying Lotus and Four Tet; that core is closely repeated on her second turn, “Smoke & Retribution,” which jolts awake in agile verses by rapper Vince Staples. The lead single, “Never Be Like You,” is already a Disclosure-remixed pop hit (and a winking psychotropic video); it saunters on Flume’s languid trap drops and a plummy R&B hook from the Canadian singer Kai, a former Jack Ü collaborator who trills a mundane mea culpa with a gleam of defiance. (“I’m only human can’t you see/I made, I made a mistake/Please just look me in my face/Tell me everything’s OK”). There’s a mathematical quality to how he deploys singers in these productions, where the heavier his low-end distortion throbs, the more featherweight smoke curls follow.

Snuck in at the close, “Tiny Cities,” featuring Beck, is comparatively minimalist, a welcome smattering of downtempo new wave synths. Here, the production is as nimble as the vocalist; Beck opens in staccato leaps, chipper despite the Sea Change-like refrain of despondency (“it was never perfect, never meant to last”), and Flume loops him in a slow, roiling momentum until the sentiment blooms into a battle-scarred catharsis worthy of a John Hughes soundtrack. There’s one betrayal of Flume’s busy hand in the song, in a dubstep-lite drop halfway, but it’s energizing. The delicate ebb that follows it—complete with falsetto from Beck, naturally—is the most vulnerable moment of the album. Skin’s other cameos don’t approach that humanity: Little Dragon’s “Take a Chance” buckles under an erratic beat that feels determined to remix itself twice over, and Tove Lo’s lilt sounds harried on “Say It,” though her chorus does generously provide your next Tinder icebreaker (“let me fuck you right back”).

Against this, the instrumentals can be hesitant, as if waiting patiently for a vocalist to drop by—“Pika” stretches out a fragment of a SBTRKT-like soul murmur, and “Free” pushes the repetitive yet determined synth runs of a keytar gained sentience. But there is one glimpse of intriguing extroversion in Flume’s standalones: “Wall Fuck,” the musician’s aforementioned attempt to rip the universe a new one, which delivers a hell of a rubbery, electrohouse-inflected bass and snarls a sliver of ghostly female coos into a strange, invigorating banger. It’s short and snappy, gone too fast in an album that could’ve been streamlined to let moments like it shine. But maybe it’s the sound of floodgates opening.

The Guardian 60

(Transgressive)

“Oh, great! Just what the world has been waiting for,” runs the cynical first response to this collaboration-heavy Australian dance package, “Disclosure from Down Under”. But while the multimillion Vevo views of F word-garnished electro power ballad Never Be Like You featuring Kai suggest the advent of a trance Eamon, Flume (the aqueous altar ego of Sydney bedroom boffin Harley Edward Streten) actually covers a wider musical waterfront than he needs to. Distinguished guests – UK nearly siren AlunaGeorge, rapper Vince Staples – are ushered respectfully through a series of viable electronic hinterlands, where a couple of them, notably perennial cameo supplier Little Dragon and Wu Tang vet Raekwon, manage to put down roots in actual songs.