by Chris Polley (@qhrizpolley)
“If a 13-year-old kid in Alabama whose dad only listens to Bob Seger gets his hands on Fantasy World as their first record, that’s going to fuck that dude up!” Emil Amos of Lilacs & Champagne (as well as Grails and Holy Sons) said of the duo’s latest LP in an interview with Sun 13 last month. In other words, the music in question is, well, difficult to describe in typical genre buzzwords, though many have tried. Neither “psychedelic” nor “trip-hop” do much of any justice to the twosome’s defiant sound. Then again, “sound collage” doesn’t help much either because even that movement’s progenitors like Negativland or People Like Us tend to focus more on the process than the end-product.
Lilacs & Champagne, while likely influenced by acts from all of these worlds of swirling and sample-based music and more, evade the above labels through a compositional style that alternately chooses warmth over the clinical and mood over the experimental. Fantasy World goes down smooth from top to bottom with just enough ominousness to keep the listener on their toes. Alex Hall, also of Grails, is the other half of the act, and as anyone who’s spent time with L&C’s other group knows, this general tone is what they have trafficked in since Neurot Recordings introduced the world to the Portland band with 2003’s daring debut of distorted instrumental dynamics, The Burden of Hope. They want to enthrall, genuinely, but the icing on the proverbial cake is making you a wee-bit frightened too.
Let’s start with the inviting songs. Jazzy groove-smacked centerpiece “No More Sherry” is perhaps the record’s most accessible entry point, but it also works a lot of magic as the intermission in the middle of a long-player that volleys around melting Rhodes piano riffs with creepy vocal tracks as if they’re as melodious a pair as a broken heart and an acoustic guitar. Similarly, there’s a new age synth-heavy serenity to “Rude Dream” that suggests DJ Shadow remixing Angelo Badalementi’s Twin Peaks score. It’s just undeniably beautiful, no matter how strange it might be at first listen. “Melissa” is more of a slow-burn that continues this Lynchian atmosphere but with even more delicacy and less insidiousness. Harps and flutes trickle and flutter in between crisp breakbeats as sound effects and cropped ululations peek from behind. The vibes are so good you might think you’re being hypnotized by a pair of witches, and who knows what plans they have for you on side B.
Luckily, while the second half of the album is indeed a deep dive into further realms of the unknown, it’s also just as intriguing and, err, bewitching. “Leprotic Phantasies” whirrs and chatters, loops falling apart and rebuilding with stomps, snaps, and a quiet but very audible voice confidently dictating, “you know, I’d like to see a homeless person in everyone’s house for Thanksgiving.” Fantasizing about infecting the overprivileged with a dose of humility and humanity? Sign me up. The penultimate jam “Dr. Why” feels like a coda with a curse (accidental Third Eye Blind reference—sorry, I’m keeping it), but the kind of curse that’s deserved and that makes you feel like the newly possessed protagonist at the end of a horror movie. Dub-drenched and locked in like a slow-motion locomotive, the crackles underneath the reverbed speed-picking weigh the listener down with no intention of allowing escape.
Fantasy World, their fourth LP, and first in nearly ten years, proves that there’s always a way to get stranger, and that never means having to give up on listenability. That is, honestly, the key to fucking kids up—in a good way—you know, musically.