Sylvan Essos’ new electro-pop album defies all expectations

The electronic vertigo takes off immediately and rarely relaxes on No Rules Sandy, Sylvan Esso’s fourth studio album. How can I be moved when everything is moving, Amelia Meath calmly reflects in the opening track, Moving, over a hissing, rushing rhythm, octave blips and stereo panning noises that keep things spinning. It’s a dazzling start for an album that celebrates renewed and unconstrained movement: light on the surface, determined at the base.

Sylvan Esso, the duo of Meath and her husband, Nick Sanborn, have created their own electro-pop niche: transparent yet complex, ethereal yet serious, fond of pop structures but eager to bend them. The duo deftly deploy the hardware and software of electronic dance music, even as they eschew genres and twist standard patterns. Technology makes repetition too easy, but Sylvan Esso has better ideas.

No Rules Sandy is a pendulum sequel to Free Love, the low-key, melancholy album that arrived in September 2020 as pandemic stasis and isolation deepened. Free Love contemplated, from a distance, shared pleasures that were once taken for granted. , with songs that aspired to be, as they say, Shaking numbness.

In new songs from Sylvan Essos, fun is back at your fingertips. Sunburn celebrates the excesses too much sun, too much sweetness with a title punctuated by the joyful sample of a bicycle bell. I did not care revels in unexpected romance with a euphoric mix of Afro-pop guitars, Balkan choral harmonies and bubbly synthesizers.

Sylan Esso has not remained isolated during the pandemic. In March 2021, he gathered other musicians around his home base in North Carolina and completely reworked Free Love’s electronic tracks for a hand-played livestream set, titled With love a reminder of concert camaraderie. In September, the duo goes on tour again. Still, No Rules Sandy sounds like Sylvan Esso has plenty of time to have fun in the studio.

There’s a spirit of trying anything, whirling fantasy throughout the new album, a determination that any setting can change at any time. The watchwords of the albums are the refrain of your reality, a track that mixes syncopated and ambiguous synthesizer chords and a sighing string quartet: surreal but free it’s your reality.

Typical electronic pop and dance music offers reassurance through predictability: obvious, reliable rhythm over the bottom, sharp verse-chorus-verse delineations for songs, or measured four-bar buildups leading to anticipated gains in songs. dance floors. Sylvan Esso defies all of these expectations. Throughout No Rules Sandy beats appear, fracture and suddenly disappear and return; vocals are intimate and naturalistic one moment, glitchy or multi-tracked or offbeat the next.

In Echo Party, Meath talks about lots of people dancing downtown, with hats and piano chords reminiscent of disco and house music. But the track shrewdly refuses to settle into a club groove. The sliding bassline slows down to turn things up (or out); later the rhythm drops completely, leaving Meath on a looping a cappella syllable: by, by, by.

The adjustments keep coming. Look at Me tackles the attention economy All I want is to be seen, Meath sings with production suggesting an internet that is constantly in motion; the beat is set almost entirely from above by pecking, tapping, booping, snapping offbeats. Cloud Walker shimmers in and out of a 4/4 and 3/4 sense, subdivided by the fibrous cymbals of breakbeats, while Meath’s voice is doubled in chords as she sings about fear and acceptance: learn disaster/relax in style.

As this line suggests, No Rules Sandy is optimistic but not oblivious. Everyone hears with me / the alarm the alarm the alarm, Meath sings in Alarm, towards the end of the album. For all the fun Sylvan Esso was clearly having in the studio, the music also reflects just how volatile the 2020s are. All the hissing, zinging, flickering and morphing sounds promise that there are ways to deal with what is happening to us.

The final track of the album changes once more. Coming Back to You is a simple, folky ballad strummed on acoustic guitar (although Sylvan Esso can’t resist adding some filtered vocal harmonies). It promises a homecoming, a connection, a refuge: I am the root, I am the leaf/I am the great tree you grew under, sings Meath. After all the movement, the song offers a place to rest.

Sylvain Esso
No rules Sandy
(Holiday view)