Ricky Music

ブラッド・オレンジ、ミツキ参加!アーロン・メイン率いるポーチーズ待望の最新アルバム完成!!!!

アレックスGやブラッド・オレンジことデヴ・ハインズの参加でも話題となった前作より2年、NYを拠点に活動するアーロン・メイン率いるエレクトロニック・バンド、ポーチーズが待望の最新アルバム『Ricky Music』とともに帰還!

アンノウン・モータル・オーケストラのジェイコブ・ポートレートを共同プロデューサーに迎え、2017年12月から2019年の春にかけてレコーディングされた本作は、前作に続き盟友デヴ・ハインズ、テン年代後半のNYを代表するアーティストのひとりであるミツキ、キャット・パワーやエンジェル・オルセンのサポートを務めたブルックリンの新鋭ジーラ(Zsela)がゲスト参加。センチメンタルなメロディーのループとエモーショナルなブリッジが80sソースのミニマルな蒼いエレクトロ・バンド・サウンドに映える先行シングル「rangerover」や「Do U Wanna」を筆頭に自身たちのディスコグラフィーを拡張するオープン・マインドなポップ・ソング全11曲を収録。

Beginning with 2016s Pool, his second album under the Porches moniker, Aaron Maine fashioned a distinctively spare and brooding form of synthesizer song. Highly stylized and mostly self-recorded, the tracks have ranged from eerie synth pop to pining keyboard balladry, with an intimate, lovelorn melancholia dominating each album. He reinforces all of those qualities on a dramatic fourth long-player, Ricky Music. It represents Maines first time working with a co-producer, Unknown Mortal Orchestras Jacob Portrait, and was self-recorded at home and with Portrait at his Brooklyn studio. It opens with the restrained, pseudo-acoustic intro to Patience. Electric piano, acoustic guitar, and string voices eventually give way to pulsing, overdriven synth tones and crashing mechanical beats. These types of broad, brash palette strokes continue throughout the record and help define it, while lyrics yearn for love in better circumstances. On the mood-swinging Do U Wanna (Im so happy I could die/Happy I could die/Happy I could die), the singers touch-and-go frame of mind is reflected in the juxtaposition of a feel-good melody, fragile vocals, soothing harmonic keys, and a strong drum machine groove alongside a jarring cowbell thats mixed conspicuously high. In keeping with a sense of unbalance, half-minute track PFB has relentless, jangly strummed guitar accompanying a repeated lyric about how bad things look. Later, an unidentifiable Mitski joins Maine for brief backup on Madonna, a house-styled entry about jealousy, and Devonte Hynes and Zsela contribute to Fuck_3, a sinuous track distinguished by its bass clarinet, harpsichord-like tones, and improvised percussion and piano. The album closes with the emotionally fitting Wrote Some Songs, a suicide fantasy about having to answer for his life at the pearly gates. Taken together, Ricky Musics high-contrast, theatrical style plays out like a mini (24-minute) chamber-synth song cycle about infatuation, sex, and heartbreak -- with just enough balance between candidness and self-awareness to keep us rooting for the lead. ~ Marcy Donelson