At the end of “Soft Wet Clay,” a brooding ballad tucked in the back half of Nick Hakim’s new album, something exhilarating almost happens. All of the instruments drop out except for a heavily filtered drum kit and a piano plunking dissonant chords. For a moment, this duet seems to sag, almost like it’s slowing down; then, suddenly, it speeds up, gathering force and swagger. And then, just when the song seems primed to go somewhere new and potentially exciting, it cuts out.
Hakim has made a career out of writing beautiful songs and then subtly glitching, stretching, and otherwise gumming them up. Since his 2014 debut, the two-part EP Where Will We Go, he has developed a distinctive style: part sepia-toned psych rock, part Soulquarians-style modern R&B, where live instruments and MPCs bounce off one another to create grooves that hover between the human and the machinic. The off-kilter production elements often function as repositories for the turmoil that Hakim’s relaxed singing and unshowy playing belie. Partway through “QADIR,” the apocalyptic highlight of his 2020 album WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD, Hakim’s voice acquires a demonic pitched-down double and a backing choir of wordless cries: This is where the song’s icy undercurrent of dread boils up into hot desperation.
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I Can See, his fourth studio album, is largely devoid of this kind of drama, and it suffers for it. The songs all inhabit a balmy medium zone: between sonic gunk and clarity, between sharp hook and vague atmosphere. The tempo is relentlessly moderate. Hakim’s voice is more subdued than ever, both in his delivery and in where it sits in the mix. There is tension in these songs if you listen carefully—like the synth-bass swoop that unsettles the chorus of “The Reason,” or how the riff in “Endlessly Waiting” is actually a piano and a synth working in tandem, playing close voicings that tick-tock back and forth. And are those vocals on the title track lightly Chipmunked? But in general, the scuzz in these songs is homogenized, distributed evenly rather than sticking out in clumps. A cassetteish hiss is the first sound you hear on the album, and it persists throughout, wrapping all the songs in a haze of pleasant degradation. Promotional copy describes the album as “medicinal”; if that is true, that medicine is probably a soporific.
With its dedication to repetition, its allergy to extremes, and its fascination with the materiality of sound—the production by Hakim and longtime collaborator Andrew Sarlo wants you to feel the creak of every key and the rumble of every sawtooth wave—I Can See has all the ingredients of something like a work of neo-soul minimalism. Hakim, a genre chameleon who has performed as a sideman for Adrianne Lenker, made a record with the jazz saxophonist Roy Nathanson, and been sampled by T-Pain, has also claimed minimalist icons Steve Reich and Terry Riley as influences. And yet while Reich is famously a proponent of “music as a gradual process,” the songs on I Can See don’t really build; they just proceed. With the exception of that brief tantalizing acceleration at the end of “Soft Wet Clay,” they end up more or less where they start.
