Archie Pelago - Hall Of Human Origins

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  • Styles Upon Styles has made a name for itself with its conceptual Bangers & Ash series, and now comes its first release with a regular catalogue number. It's a five-tracker from the sax-and-cello-wielding Archie Pelago, one of the bustling Brooklyn scene's most curious acts. The trio delivers an off-kilter EP that lives up to the young label's idiosyncratic reputation. Incorporating live instrumentation is always a gamble in house music, and sometimes Archie Pelago end up down on their luck. But with every release, they get better at blending the acoustic with the synthetic. "Chronomancer" has one of their prettiest rhythms, kicking up a gust of warm air behind it with some help from the cello. In its quietest parts, however, the saxophone becomes a little overbearing. It's something they correct on "Joyce Drop," where the horn bleats between the beats as a bold melodic accent rather than a heavy-handed lead. It also shows off their penchant for weird structures, as the beat suddenly switches gears about halfway through—a trick they love to pull. "I Know About Robert's World" is a bustling world of offbeat textures, with bleepy melodies flying by like a tape on fast-forward. Here the cello and sax act as a grounded counterpoint to the electronic elements. The title track throws their sound in a blender—it's a tribal dreamscape of shifting rhythms, where the live instruments again take a more subdued role. For less forgiving listeners, their smoothness might melt into a mush of muzak, but Hall Of Human Origins shows they're becoming experts at toeing that line.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Chronomancer A2 Joyce Drop A3 Wrong Apartment (Worms) B1 I Know About Robert's World B2 Hall Of Human Origins
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