San Francisco’s Christopher Dexter Greenspan also goes by the name of oOoOO, and Without Your Love is his debut album. In its entirety, the record stands as audible performance art, where the movement of the elements within the music is equally important to the sound it creates. There is a layering, a development of dimension and depth that is drenched in a supernatural atmosphere of hazy electro, dark synths and warped vocals.
Tentatively opening this door to the melodically-occult is ‘Sirens//Stay Here‘. Essentially two tracks coupled together, the first half begins with crackling echoes that evoke a sense of a vast, haunting isolation in the wilderness. Pianos twinkle with theatricality that fades into a buzzing and clanking of glass. Pounding bass notes drum out a haphazard rhythm that, like a tribal call, welcomes a wired-up, synthed-out vocal. Self-harmonised, oOoOO sings, ‘ask me what I wanna be, ask me what I wanna do’, which by now we are inevitably interested in. As it turns into a more romantic duet, his female counterpart replies with sullen weariness, while the pair unite to end in a resounding, ‘you’re not the one’.
Track two, ‘3:51 AM’, is a time that we’re all familiar with. Whether we’ve faced it alone or with friends, it’s a time when there’s usually nothing left to drink, the bars are shut, nothing’s on TV, you don’t want to cook but you do want to eat, and an indefinable feeling of nothingness takes hold. You’re caught in a moment where it’s too late to really do anything and too early to start anything else so you sit and become pensive and think about, you know, stuff. Life changes, old relationships, that sort of thing that you’ll undoubtedly forget by sunrise. The track itself complements this indefinable feeling of not quite nostalgia, not quite melancholy, as it balances on the melodic twilight of the next day and last night. Teaming with a pulsing synth, it mirrors the ticking of a clock that resounds louder than your own thoughts – because everything is louder and more unsettling at this hour. It’s short lived, but hits you while it can – gently, however, so gently in fact that you don’t notice the effect until the title track begins.
‘Without Your Love’ utilises interspersed, wobbling flashes of electronics that glow with an absorbing lethargy as a female collaborator laments, ‘you don’t want me anymore’, whilst ‘On It’ resumes the pensive XXX, melodically outlining the anatomies of melancholy parallel to ‘Without Your Love’. ‘Crossed Wires’ sounds like you expect it too – the chopped, fuzzy echoes sound like Samara from The Ring is going to jump through your headphones at any moment. It’s unnerving as muffled vocals rebound off each other as if they were trapped in a well – and the abrupt conclusion doesn’t alleviate matters either. With heaving sighs and stop-timed beats, ‘Mouchette‘ solemnly drones its way to the three-minute mark, creating a dense reverb of heavily distorted, child-like vocals, whilst ‘The South’ condenses thick, electronic throbs and staccato clangs amidst vocals and hazy echoes that create a dark and highly unpredictable atmosphere.
Further into the record sits ‘5:51 AM’, more sanguine than its earlier counterpart – a haze swells into an abrupt severing of an already slow tempo to give way to the closing track, ‘Across A Sea’. The sluggish tempo is offset by the skipping beat that flits across the surface of an eerie piano refrain. String-like melodies creep through the deeply muffled vocals, but it doesn’t really matter that (for the majority of the record) you can’t make out what on earth anyone is saying. The powerful sequencing of the sounds themselves almost render any lyrical vocal obsolete, encouraging an altered ‘humming’ that makes more of an impression through mystery.
Like !!!, Chris Dexter’s alter-ego might suggest that he just fell onto his keyboard (or started typing like a 13-year-old girl) for a musical identity, and whether or not he did, he certainly did not just chaotically throw some hazy beats and drum machines onto a record. Everything has been carefully calculated and yet flourishes with a haunting effortlessness. It isn’t the unexpected jumps that create the eerie atmosphere (considering there really aren’t any), but the restraint, the sense of something pausing, observing, that rattles the nerves. Like a lone wolf, Without Your Love evokes a sense that it will one day spring on you with a fierce appetite. Of course, you make it through the record physically unscathed, but a sense of unease will linger long after it has come to its own breathtakingly enigmatic conclusion.
– Charlie Clarkson
Without Your Love is available on Nihjgt Feelings from June 24. You can pre-order it here.
