Review Summary: hot coffee and 400-pound blunts.
The crackled soliloquy of antique vinyl pierced the smokey, oaken-walled living room like a holiday yule log. The pungency of burnt jazz cabbage and Viceroys swirled around the dimly lit space like ink drops in water. I have a hot fever, but am helplessly amazed at how colourful these sepia tones have become as Tsuruda's 2014 masterwork,
drumsand, plays its course. A good review for this album really should sound akin to something rattled off the back of an expensive wine bottle, so I'll get right to it...
A far cry from the high gloss, maxed out sine waves of most electronic music, LA-based producer Thomas Tsuruda adopts a kind of lo-fi and seductively organic sound with a headroom that leaves his vintage, bass heavy aesthetic lots of room to breathe. Dynamic and brilliant, its holds an evocative jazz club atmosphere adorned in vestures of exotic world music rolled in powdery layers of codeine-laced nightclub braggadocio. Although, heady as this may sound,
drumsand is not an album mired with inaccessible pretentiousness. With songs like "400 pound blunt" and "vans", Tsuruda shows us his uncanny ability to drop breathtaking bass weight while seamlessly maintaining his picturesquely subdued motifs. Rich with laid back jazz compositions, tasteful hip-hop sampling, and marvellously heavy bass, the mood becomes almost steampunk. Serving as its own parallel evolution of early 20th century club music, there's certainly an unmistakable feeling of living in a alternate universe's timeline, just adjacent to our own; something very hard to achieve artistically.
Now, pigeonholing
drumsand to a reduction of its overarching materialization really isn't fair, because the album simply isn't based on a singular idea or premise. The variation of emotion and composition is staggering and unpredictable in the best of ways, but the essential point here is that it comes across to the listener with remarkably abundant heart and soul. Thomas Tsuruda clearly feels his music, but its not what he shows you with his sounds that makes it so emotive. Rather, its the lens in which we view
drumsand that makes this release so unforgettable and addicting. There's a certain feeling to it, as if he gave you a looking glass into his own soul, and the music we hear are pure emanations of his creative psyche. High praise no doubt, and justifiably so.
I'm a firm believer some music is self-aware, and by this I mean there's a very distinct element that makes an album a fully realized work of art as opposed to a collection of nice songs or ideas. Its on these rare occasions that I believe, in some spiritual sense, the music is not only completely aware of itself, but how its engaging and affecting its audience. ASC, Brian Eno, Burial, Ott - the list is endless but you get my point; they're artistic visionaries whose music comes from being genuinely human.
Alas, songwriting and conveying human emotion seem to be electronic dance music's achilles heel. Lets face it, this stuff is made to be mixed live; that's where all the elements that make it so apt at being truly moving are in full force, and there's obvious structuring formulas that streamline this process. The drawback here is usually predictability, and at worst, uninspired production to boot. There are exceptions however, and Tsuruda is one of them, gliding through a spectra of bpm's and genres with seamless genius that keeps any semblance of stagnation at bay.
Drumsand is the stuff of legend, the kind of work that transcends the time period of its release through pure chemistry and an artistic vision that doesn't revolve around trending production values. 46 minutes in this heaven flies by quickly, but sticks in your mind's eye like a feverish dream.
That broken soliloquy of crackling vinyl is still pierces the air. Muzzled by a hazy vignette of blackening my lungs, I lay in a foggy stupor.
Drumsand has moved me to the core and I'm left in the presence of true beauty. My imagination has been fully captured, and everywhere I look, that lens that Tsuruda has bestowed upon my eyes refracts the light of a surreal world. I could stay here forever.
