There’s no two ways about it: At times, Haux sounds a lot like Bon Iver. The similarity goes deeper than their shared approach to granularly detailed electronic pop, falsetto vocals, and sunken guitars; you might find yourself double-checking Spotify, wondering if somewhere, Justin Vernon’s broken angel wings are twitching. To Vern out this hard and then call a song “Hazel” almost begs for the association. Nevertheless, on Blue Angeles, as on his 2020 debut LP, Woodson Black has an otherworldly way of making an ordinary song his own.
That first album, Violence in a Quiet Mind, is remarkable for its unshelled vulnerability. It’s music you hover over, cupping your hands around it like a candle flame you have to shield from the wind. Isolation and depression are its themes; it leaves a pale scar on Blue Angeles in the barely-there folk of “Bella Blue.” But the new LP is cast as an escape from Los Angeles on the Appalachian Trail, breathing with more fresh air, natural light, and inertial energy than its superbly introverted predecessor. It’s this diurnal energy that draws out some glaring comparisons, but Black’s own fingerprints are all over them.
Blue Angeles is an album of indie rock and folk songs done up in pop, with deliriously driving basslines, precise pauses and drops, and deep DAW dives that dredge up strange volumes and curves in heartfelt, straightforward melodies. The production zings with hyperreal shudders and swooshes; stray syllables are tweezed off and blasted with freezing ethers, then left to shiver in digital limbos. The songs wax in emotion by waning in intensity, as Black’s flute-like voice slips down long, cool, fluid corridors.
Outside of well-turned but more commonplace fare like “Hazel,” “Carte Blanche,” and “Claire De Lune,” things get weirder and more interesting; a certain Old Hollywood glamour keeps casting a shadow through all the partly sunny weather. “Cover Girl” revels in raw earnestness and plush staging, sampling a classic Rita Hayworth film noir in an eerie lullaby adorned with iridescent harps. It sounds like Broken Social Scene’s “Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl” crossed with the Smashing Pumpkins deep cut “Cupid de Locke.” “Blood Moon” might have been at home on the first album, which resonated with the smallest, most cowering songs of Xiu Xiu, where the singing sounds like a weeping cartoon mouse. “Waves” is a convincing throwback to early James Blake, all loosened virtual drumheads and sewing-machine percussion, even though there’s a questionable Post Malone-y part stashed a little sneakily at the end.
Blue Angeles is seamlessly designed, except when it pointedly chooses not to be; across the record, there is a tendency to paste up flawless fantasies and then rip them down. When things start to feel too perfect, too professional, too cinematic, a plain acoustic guitar will shred the patina, or perhaps a brief recording of a roller coaster will zoom through a solemn anthem. On one song, a friend named Crow gives a homily about the earth; on another, he improvises on the harmonica. It resembles a light afternoon nap, when the world starts to filter into dreams. If the tentative daybreak of this album is slightly less unique than the prior record’s bottomless night, it’s just as casually gorgeous and finely shaded.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
