Whatever else hyperpop was—rambunctious, pleasure-forward, sonically inventive in tech and tempo, buzzy in all senses—it was never earnest. Danny L Harle and the rest of the PC Music org folded post-electroclash, Adbusters-style culture jamming with 4chan-y shitpost nihilism to a gabba beat. Clenched with irony, hyperpop chomped its bubblegum until the bubble burst. Behind production boards, its agents worked with geniuses like Charli XCX to remake pop in her own image. But in their own work, they went hyperprog. SOPHIE released a sprawling double album of shapeshifting anthems and transgenre experiments, followed by a posthumous one that largely failed to realize even loftier socio-political-rave ambitions. A.G. Cook and Arca released triple–plus albums accessorized by coding, fashion collabs, video art, re-dos. Anything, it sometimes felt like, instead of being vulnerable enough to risk failing at making something someone might truly, deeply love.
Harle now asks us to consider a new work, Cerulean, his debut album, despite the existence of a first album from 2021. Which, fine, what even is time anymore. He’s positioning it not as a bunch of songs but as a serious work of art, and not so much mainstream as Monteverdi, that operatic late Renaissance composer who was pilloried for relying on a body of dissonant harmonies. OK, a medieval harpsichord has the same keyboard and can produce the same melodies as the Logic one on your laptop. But it’s been half a century since Switched-On Bach. European tuning producing Eurotrance isn’t, compositionally, a bolt out of the blue. For a muse, Harle picks the most ancient one, the ocean, or maybe the second most ancient one, heartbreak; anyway, the one whose watery depths has been the source for powerful work by everyone from Kate Bush to SZA. That alarm you might be hearing is the siren song of prog ambition, all muso bona fides and little fun.
No score yet, be the first to add.
Indeed. Cerluean is anchored by a pair of instrumentals so pompous they might be camp. “Noctilucence,” named for bioluminescence after dark, is a murky combination of beachy field recordings and crashing synthetic noise. Sound waves, ocean waves, what’s the difference? “Teardrop in the Ocean” is silly like Hans Zimmer, a series of drippy crescendos that, like the title, don’t add up to much. At the heart of the album is a quartet of waterlogged compositions in which language fails the singer and melodies just sort of float by. Trance track “Island (da da da)” swaps an arpeggiator for an accordion, and sounds just like that. “Te Re Re” takes its name from the sound of finishing a yerba mate, and its sound from vocalist kacha’s churchy choral arrangements, late ’90s progressive house, and the plonky “world music” that seems to arrive any time a video game is set in a jungle village. For all that, there’s not much to grab the ear. “Laa” makes a cocktail of all of the above. And let “O Now I Am Truly Lost,” with its alienated computer blooze, be the final ripples of Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek”; that song’s uncanny valley is drained.
