Review Summary: Lift my body from the ground immediately
HAAi (aka Teneil Throssell) is an Australian DJ-producer with a decade of Londoning and a few wire-taut techno/breaks EPs behind her; “Baby, We're Ascending” is her first LP, and as breakthrough statements go,
it’s up there. It’s been a good year for her visibility -
blowing up might be putting it a little strongly, but she’s well-represented in the right places - but she’s hardly needs a success story assembled on their behalf because her music, even at its most glitched-out or lackadaisical, is the kind of thing that invites an audience with open arms. Her rhythms may tend towards the rigid and mechanical, splintering hints of breakbeat amidst an unrelenting techno pulse -
but her tones are absolutely never dry. There’s a warmth and resonance to every last beat here, and so the album, while frequently propulsive, is far too lush to be harsh or impersonal. When it
goes it doesn’t shut you out, it sweeps you along.
This pans out gloriously across its heavyweights: opener-in-effect “Pigeon Barron” is a steady surge of kinetic power, a rising progression that you’d probably call ‘cinematic’ if its beat weren’t to be heard first and foremost by your feet, while the impellent highlight “Purple Jelly Disc” is more volatile, opening with an off-and-on shattering of breaks before pivoting into throttling techno. HAAi’s vocal line is equal parts the life and soul of the party and a fair warning to hold on for dear life.
Most exhilarating of all is the Jon Hopkins collaboration “Baby, We're Ascending”, aptly named for the rapturous heights HAAi’s voice scales off the back of its supple trance foundation. There’s a slight deadpan to her tone; both here and elsewhere this scans as trepidation and strained restraint, something distant and yearning that draws us right into the immediate. It’s not enough to
exist in the moment - “Baby, We're Ascending” is so fantastically transportive precisely because it has us reaching for something more. It shares a hook with Mondo Grosso’s “Stranger”, one of this year’s finest pop songs, yet unlike that strong’s economical frame, it comes in fits and starts and (probably) powers on around a minute more than strictly necessary - it’s the kind of song that quite rightly knows it’s good enough to get away with this.
It’s not fair to
Baby, We're Ascending’s spread of ideas to reduce it to a full album of strictly dance music, yet its strongest moments come so overwhelmingly from the percussive end of the spectrum that
you’ll kinda wish it was. The record’s downtime is a little thorny to chart: “Orca”’s (mostly) ambient techno odyssey engaging as a standalone experience but awkward in sequence, a jarring comedown after “Baby, We're Ascending”’s highest-of-highs, while “I've Been Thinking A Lot Lately” layers the flat tones of its title lyric over an evasive piano cadence, the album’s most prosaic statement over its emptiest flourish. The song scans as wilfully oblique; HAAi owns it as such, but it’s not quite compelling enough as an idea-piece to match up to the the record’s corporally-oriented fare. Closer “Tardigrade” is the biggest success story in this vein, its piercing glitch and washed-out vocals seemingly clutching the last traces of a hitherto enduring intimacy.
This is a constant to the album even in its less successful explorations: HAAi brings character to even her bleariest pieces, and the subtle tension and interplay between her immediate-present and distant-daydream realities is a key part of her draw. Her beats are immediate and often intense, yet her use of reverb will outgun even the zaniest of your favourite dream-pop artists; it’s fuel for the kind of dance that will make you want something intangibly
more for your body, and it should be heard often, loudly and in contexts as disparate as you so please. Onwards and upwards.
