[We join our cassette tape review mid-headsmash:]
“Sometimes everything is nice, sometimes everything is terrible, and sometimes you just want to smash your head into a wall.”
As I contemplate empathizing with that, I realize that I’ve now officially lost myself within the magnetic tape traversing the tape head as it passes from reel to reel in the bright red shell. It’ll be a while before I’m able to compartmentalize the points on the spectrum glazer emphasizes in the quote above, but maybe that’s the idea — everything sort of bleeds into everything else, and nothing’s quite as clear as you’d like it to be. This complexity is what drives j. b. glazer, inspires his navigation of the elements of personality and relationships, and ends up driving him to plow through ever-muddying waters … or to pound his head against ever-softening conceptual walls.
Everything’s bruising around glazer, not just his own skull.
But all of this information swirls in the electronic whirlpool of Compact Break (Them There Records), a lo-fi bedroom concoction where glazer fools around with the fringes of pop and R&B while settling down into a languid, stoned groove for the majority of the tape. It swerves though, veering from the path, not contained within a straight line in any way, skidding into lurching and spun club alleys, then overcorrecting into crystalline ambient territory, usually within the span of a couple minutes. Vocals appear infrequently, most notably on “Gardener,” whose drooping grime gets an assist from the angelic Bianca Scout, and “Vapid Bullshit,” where glazer himself sing-speaks like a stone across a digital pond.
Complex, leisurely manic, delightful, dulled, true to life.
You know, a little nice, a little terrible, a little headsmash-y.
“That’s the basis of Compact Break.”
[We now return to our regularly scheduled TMT content.]
More about: J. B. Glazer
