Laurel Halo, Brooklyn synthwaver extraordinaire, has been getting a lot of attention over the past two years. She's released a deluge of material both under her main stage name and as King Felix, as well as featuring on Games' That We Can Play EP and gotten the Oneohtrix Point Never treatment on her 2010 track "Metal Confection." Quarantine, fittingly released on Kode9's boundary-crushing Hyperdub label, distills her previous work into a release that's beautifully bold, odd, mature and complex.
Quarantine's charm has as much to do with its deviation from Halo's previous work as it does its similarities. Much like its artwork (anime schoolgirls slaughtering themselves/each other with katanas, blood, intestines, a crumbling rainbow, all superimposed on a glittery hologram grid), Quarantine is a delicate exercise in self-contradiction: almost lacking percussion but still rhythmic, mechanical and yet somehow cathartic; foreign and difficult, but still what might be called pop.
Those already familiar with Laurel Halo will recognize her stacked-fifth, J-pop-esque melodies and complex '80s synths, but will no doubt be struck by the floating, almost arrhythmic feel that permeates much of the album. Halo's vocals are mixed much more loudly and clearly on Quarantine than on King Felix or Hour Logic; on "Years" (above) they're jarringly up-front, dry and vulnerable. Peeling back the layers of synth and reverb on the older records, Quarantine reveals a capable vocal talent whose conversational tone, loose rhyme schemes and intricate melodies feel more like meditative chants than songs.
Halo has said that Quarantine is about "contrails, trauma, volatile chemicals, viruses," but lines like "travelling heart \ don't go away" and "stare at my bed \ feel nothing \ want to realize you're my dream" reveal themes of longing and isolation at play beneath the sci-fi veneer. These decidedly emotional, yet somehow unnatural-sounding gestures are what makes Quarantine so compelling: like a musical equivalent of the uncanny valley, it's at once coldly alienating and warmly human. From abstract wanderings like "Wow" and "Carcass" to the near-pop "Thaw" and "Light & Space" (below), Halo blurs the line between man and machine to craft a contemplative, breathtaking first full-length.
Quarantine's charm has as much to do with its deviation from Halo's previous work as it does its similarities. Much like its artwork (anime schoolgirls slaughtering themselves/each other with katanas, blood, intestines, a crumbling rainbow, all superimposed on a glittery hologram grid), Quarantine is a delicate exercise in self-contradiction: almost lacking percussion but still rhythmic, mechanical and yet somehow cathartic; foreign and difficult, but still what might be called pop.
Those already familiar with Laurel Halo will recognize her stacked-fifth, J-pop-esque melodies and complex '80s synths, but will no doubt be struck by the floating, almost arrhythmic feel that permeates much of the album. Halo's vocals are mixed much more loudly and clearly on Quarantine than on King Felix or Hour Logic; on "Years" (above) they're jarringly up-front, dry and vulnerable. Peeling back the layers of synth and reverb on the older records, Quarantine reveals a capable vocal talent whose conversational tone, loose rhyme schemes and intricate melodies feel more like meditative chants than songs.
Halo has said that Quarantine is about "contrails, trauma, volatile chemicals, viruses," but lines like "travelling heart \ don't go away" and "stare at my bed \ feel nothing \ want to realize you're my dream" reveal themes of longing and isolation at play beneath the sci-fi veneer. These decidedly emotional, yet somehow unnatural-sounding gestures are what makes Quarantine so compelling: like a musical equivalent of the uncanny valley, it's at once coldly alienating and warmly human. From abstract wanderings like "Wow" and "Carcass" to the near-pop "Thaw" and "Light & Space" (below), Halo blurs the line between man and machine to craft a contemplative, breathtaking first full-length.
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