LoneMoon
Amaranth
(Self-released, 2015)
B-
My first brush with amaranth was an episode of Chopped. It’s a cereal-like, flexible ingredient, one that can be puffed in boiling water or fried for a crunch. It can be sweet or savory, a protein-rich grain that’s a staple in certain cultures. When certain strands are planted, a beautiful, magenta flower blooms. It’s all sickeningly poetic, really — sustenance turned aesthetic pleasure. And it speaks to the approach LoneMoon carries into this full-length debut of the same name, feeding your soul in moments and slaving away at a feast for your eyes and ears in another.
The Oklahoma City producer neither aims too high nor too low with Amaranth, concocting middlebrow electronic music that jumps between puddles of fashion show ambience, brisk mall-pop and fist-pumping bass drops. He’s not pioneering new ground at any point in this LP, but it’s fresh all the same, mostly in the weight of his disparate influences that come to surface. He’s more than a little convincing too, sounding seasoned and secure in the execution of a consistently adventurous dance record.
The experience feels scattered in moments, especially given its extended length at 16 songs, which is really just to say that there’s a lot to digest. His recoveries are swift, and it helps that Amaranth mostly follows a stead path, shifting from a pre-party buzz (the especially potent “Hop & Skip”) towards more crowd-pleasing brostep (“Journey,” “Chronicle”) at its center. Lovably dorky, 8-bit chiptune and a neon-rimmed K-pop influence keep those more uptempo anthems from going all Jersey Shore club rat, and tipping the equation in favor of those tendencies feels like a more natural fit (the ever shifting “Collision,” the Sega-like “Petals”). Trouble brews when he eschews those idiosyncratic traits for playing it straight, as the proficient but hollowly nondescript trap “Rising” falls into headfirst. He’s admirably dedicated to making listeners happy, but that comes easiest when he’s not worrying what they like and might not.
And holy wow when that sort of tunnel vision comes into play is the product dynamic. Flirty and animated, “Hop & Skip” bounces with the best of them, taking the bubbly wall cloud of an early Passion Pit cut and tying a string to it like a balloon — a skying, lofty journey through sunset pinks and yellows. “Hold On II” has a similar soft-pastel-cartoon kind of charm, bass fuzz shaving the tops of electric squiggles and dainty keyboard snapshots, where “All I Need” ditches any sort of party-starter ambitions for afternoon playdate fun.
LoneMoon champions himself as something of a storyteller, describing Amaranth as “story music” on his SoundCloud, and he works hard to build a narrative instead of a DJ set tracklist, which makes for a better album. It could benefit from some editing to clean it up a bit, but Amaranth is paced to theatrically build from the subtle opening of a “Glass Box” all the way to the climax of “Chronicle.” The album wisely winds down with starlit walks in its waning moments instead of exhausting itself in an endless pursuit of dancehall bangers. He does well to craft idyllic, rainy window ballads with the shutter-closing pair of “Rest Now” and “Still Waiting.”
Porter Robinson has become one of the biggest players in the EDM game in thanks to a comparable penchant for building up a world in conjunction with a drop, and this thoughtful take shows similar promise. There are plenty of talented ambient artists and panty-dropping festival DJs out there, and LoneMoon feels like one of just a few primed to straddle that border between them.
