Review Summary: languid pillow beats for new modes of living
In my private pod I’m the last person on earth. I move between screens, either to interact with human facsimiles or watch boundless content on former life. I engage with the novel event until pushed to disengage, shutting out websites from my curated reality. I sit in stretches of time, shuffling through activities to ward off the brooding. Sometimes I lie in bed and long for a human body next to mine. Mostly I’m just idle.
As an introspective space,
Mirror explores the paths we now take in daily living. There’s a scatterdness to our choices, and I’ve come to rely on this record as a guide towards the ones I want to make. These are pillow beats to lean into, air textures that imbue serenity. I often recommend “morning albums,” sounds to fill your mind and ease you in; this should get sequenced after. What might come across as standard Giegling at first reveals a subtlety and breadth of ideas.
Drawing lines between downtempo, ambient house and instrumental hip-hop, Leagov suggests ways of being, none more important than the other. Woodwinds and bells permeate; synths gleam in reflection.
Mirror has a grayscale comfort, avoiding the saccharine of these elements. Consider album highlight “Hyyde,” which starts with a hip-hop beat that Traumprinz would be proud of: disinterested and snug like a jacket. Minor keys follow in wistful beauty, probing reasons to get off the couch. A BoC melody arrives as an epiphany before falling back to reverie. The cycles of a day are captured with a freedom from obligation, a sense that
nothing matters. Like my take on post-2016 records, I find the most successful ones offer a spiritual response to what’s happening in the world. So bake a cake. Exercise. Fall prey to the endless scroll. Just take care of yourself.
