![]() ![]() Last year, Parisian developers Fingerlab put together a wonderful app called DM1, an all-in-one drum machine originally for iOS. If you own a Mac and the DM1 drum machine app on iOS, you’re in for a treat. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here. ![]() (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)Ĭatch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. For González, I imagine, it sounds like home. It’s a lovely little sendoff, even if the main emotion it provokes is a desire to visit the Swedish countryside. Local Valley returns to pastoral quietude in its final moments, with the tranquil “Honey Honey” essentially serving as a duet between González and more chirping birds. Instead of letting the drum machine reshape his songwriting, he mostly uses it as a metronome. These new songs are energizing for González, but they lack that sense of genuine discovery, of a songwriter being lifted away from his usual comforts. He has dabbled in electronic textures before “Cello Song,” his 2009 Dark Was the Night collaboration with the Books (covering Nick Drake’s song of the same name), was excellent. But his foray into beat-making-particularly on “Swing” and “Tjomme”-feels perfunctory at best. González has said the song’s Caribbean style reflects the music he likes to listen to at home. ![]() And “Swing” is the biggest departure for the songwriter, owing both to its goofy lyrics (“Swing your belly, baby,” he exhorts over and over) and its prominent reggaetón beat. González spent some time tinkering with a DM1 drum-machine app on his iPad, which livens up the tempos and brings a welcome bounce to mantra-like grooves like “Lasso In.” “Lilla G,” written for González’s young daughter, is a dreamy folktronica reverie buoyed by lovely, soft-focus harmonies and well-deployed whistling. Yet the album’s most surprising element lies in the uptempo rhythms and electronic pulses that spice up the album’s back half. Covers are a longtime González tradition, but for an American listener unfamiliar with Laleh, the latter song could easily be mistaken as one of his own. First single “El Invento” combines Spanish lyrics with one of his trademark open tunings, while both “Tjomme” and the album’s sole cover, “En Stund På Jorden,” a song by the Iranian-Swedish pop singer Laleh that he has pared down to its barest essence, are sung in Swedish. In interviews, he has emphasized the fact that Local Valley is his first album to contain songs in each of his three languages. But somewhere around “Head On”-a standout track that’s as close as González gets to a protest song, with stomping handclaps egging on his jabs at “corrupt oligarchs” and “power snatchers”- Local Valley picks up the pace.Īn English-speaking songwriter born in Sweden to Argentinian parents, González has always been a cross-cultural talent. The record opens on a sleepy note, with home-recorded birdsong ornamenting the new-age reveries of “Visions” and guitars rustling like a delicate forest in the hymn-like “Horizons.” None of the first four songs rise above a pleasant murmur. Recorded at González’s bucolic home studio near the Swedish coast, Local Valley brings no grand reinventions, but does gently tweak the songwriter’s approach and inject a little rhythmic bounce into his songwriting, making for a livelier, more playful album than Vestiges & Claws. ![]()
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