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July 27, 2018 - Brainfeeder
After several heartthrob releases, Ross from Friends (real name Felix Clary Weatherall) has put out his first album Family Portrait on Brainfeeder, label of seminal electronicist Flying Lotus. The constant introduction of new textures and sound-bytes clarify the relationship between label and artist, as Family Portrait crafts a heady thought-scape threaded with emotional estuaries and layered with pleasing peripheral accents.
‘Happy Birthday Nick’ opens the album onto a hodgepodge of textural oddities vaguely arranged along the premise of a rhythm. Disconcerting as your own birth. From experience I know that the song is precisely as disconcerting as the birth. But by the end, Weatherall is blinking and ready to make music as Ross from Friends. Any hesitation I had about the album was summed up in its first track, but it’s functional. One, it’s a shrugging off—vacating the system of neurotic spasm. Two, it preps us for the highly tangential nature of Weatherall’s song crafting.
‘Thank God I’m a Lizard.’ Indeed thank all gods for this. Weatherall follows up with a solipsism about a lizard life that, in true qabbalistic form, understands and reframes enlightenment empiricism beyond its own ontology. The boy whispers his praise for his truer form. A pious young man. Yes. Beautiful Ross. His diligence four on the floors it. Cave dwelling at its most cerebral includes tinny percussion abundant with thump and haunting rolling pads. And that’s just what Weatherall does here. By relaying the fore and background Weatherall turns a straightforward dance structure into an atmospheric dark boogie.
Now the real juice is at our lips. Track three, ‘Wear Me Down,’ is a long moody libation. It’s also a mood hotel with a great location and amenities. My most frequent re-listen by far. A nocturnal awakening to the first time that a person feels it is not enough on its own, yet two too often is too much. “How can something so wonderful wear me down?” It is unfortunate to become a canyon as a result of your effort to be a mountain, adding as you do the movement of another to your landscape. And yet the canyon is capable of greater fullness. But enough about you.
Track four gets us to some recent history in the pop electronic experimental cross over. There can be no apologies made to anyone titling something ‘The Knife’ for the listeners’ conjuring of both Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House and the subversive electro pop duo The Knife—a pair of Foucault maniacs. There seems to be, especially in its arrangement, a wink to the pop duo. It’s an 80s enthused construction with tom-centric percussion. Much of the movement derives from the varying EQing throughout the track. So much so that the premise follows: here is the original, now here are all its forms. Here I am and here is the knife, and know that the knife and I are interchangeable.
Mingling in a pre-dystopic sound profile, ‘Project Cybersyn,’ is a complicated titular choice. Aside from being the name of the fifth track, Project Cybersyn is a now defunct Chilean endeavor to improve the economy through software. The song reimagines the viable system as a chipper, though enslaved, process with unusual flat-pitched trills and an industrious rhythm throughout, at once sympathizing with the system and the people who hoped to see their country come of greater age as heard in the dimly lit saxophone breaks from the hard electronics. Young Weatherall is gaining global consciousness in lieu of something.
He’s distancing himself prior to his contextual representation—a family portrait. ‘Family Portrait’ bisects the album and is playfully short and amorphous. An eye of the storm track, pervasively calm and pensive. The track does well to create a sense of stillness with overly taught sounds as to indicate near-snapping. This is a “do it for mom moment” in my book.
The seventh track ‘Pale Blue Dot’ takes its theme from Voyagers’ 1990 Valentines Day photo of earth by the same name. Without deviating from, but rather transforming Weatherall’s innovative textures and sound layering, the track takes distances to a new level. Resplendent with faint white noise and vacant audio space, small sounds redouble and echo in what is metaphorically space but is actually self awareness. To this, the following track ‘Back into Space’ is essentially an epilogue sympathetic to the famed satellite. Many signals are picked up and dropped off, before a single beam is stabilized. We are almost in the self-realization portion of the hero’s journey, when growth also sprouts identity.
Weatherall is by now clearly bent on a coming of age introspective that enjoys an understated scientific approach. ‘Parallel Sequence’ while surely referring to the ninth song on Family Portrait also refers to the computing method by which DNA is decoded or archived. Taking its cues from both sci-fi movies and a general sense of wonderment for its sample choices, Weatherall sequences a surprisingly romantic Canadian television show “How It’s Made” track.
I don’t even want to talk about the wonderful song ‘R.A.T.S.,’ or in the medical field: Rapid Application Tourniquet System for stopping blood loss due to lost limbs or massive lacerations. But it’s good, though by now the album is winding down. Most of what Weatherall has to say has been said. ‘R.A.T.S.’ is about tying up some loose ends and losing that which no longer serves. This is a Saturn return, astrologers’ favorite time for becoming someone else.
I also don’t want to talk about the final two tracks ‘Don’t Wake Dad’ and ‘The Beginning’. But here I go. The first of them is a playful board game reference with insidious undertones, considering the connotations that father-directed wariness has gone since 1992. The track is sleepy and sensual with high hats neatly buzzing into the background synths. A lot of merging going on here until the kick drum and snare come in to make distinctions along with a couple vocal samples. ‘Don’t Wake Dad' from what I wonder? I wonder without much curiosity despite the potential for great implication. Without the rest of the album, ‘Don’t Wake Dad’ falls into the nondescript, a general groove without much nuance. ‘The Beginning’ follows suit, feigning narrative circularity. But this is an impressionistic album and no matter how charming the marimba riff, we’ve gone on two songs too many.
An outstanding album minus two songs. 10 was the right number of songs. ⛰️