Album Of The Week: Les Sins Michael

This week sees the release of two oblique, confounding albums, albums that toy with ideas of genre and song-form and vibe, albums I was excited to hear. I don't really like either of them. Arca's Xen has moments of dark, glinting electronic majesty. But the album is as interested in rupture as it is in rhythm, and all these discordant sounds and tempo lurches keep coming in to interrupt things and throw you, the listener, off. This is clearly intentional, and clearly a statement, but that tendency continually rips me out of the album. It loses me. Grouper's Ruins, meanwhile, is a murky amniotic drift of an album, a hushed an intimate work from an artist who usually hides herself under layers of reverb. But it's so quiet, and so minimal, that I find myself totally unable to focus on it. I wanted to like both of these albums, and I couldn't find a foothold in either of them. Music criticism is an entirely subjective thing, so it's not necessarily a failure of mine or a failure of the albums' that they didn't speak to me. It's just a thing that happens. Plenty of critics whose opinions I respect have gone to bat for both the Arca and Grouper albums, and both of them leave me absolutely cold. Your mileage may vary. But for me, the most consistently rewarding album of the week wasn't one of the difficult listens. It was the guy from Toro Y Moi making breezy and low-key dance music under another assumed name, playing with ideas of genre but changing none of them. Michael isn't anyone's idea of a landmark work, but it's warm and pleasant and genuinely likable. For me, that's enough to win the week.