3 out of 5

Label: Fonolith

Produced by: Neil Scrivin

Phono Ghosts’ retro vibe – warm synths; doses of funk; accompanying VHS-quality late-nite infomercial style videos – sits well with this generation’s love for classic scores and darkwave video game soundtracks, but then PG – Neil Scrivin – levels up by rinsing all of this through an IDM filter, creating a unique sound thats the best of the 80s bitten by the most modern of electronica. It’s been a pretty delightful journey across multiple cassettes / LPs, with variations on this theme represented by other recording names Scrivin uses.

Ghosts’ latest, Warm Pad, Sharp Stab dives almost exclusively in to the most laid-back and fuzzed out of the artist’s offerings, which I’d be down for, except the sequencing of the album’s nine tracks puts the most minimal examples of this back-to-back, making the midsection drag quite a bit. After perking us back up with some deeper, groovier cuts, the album then closes on Tears Over Chroma, which ends up being one of the least impactful songs on Warm Pad, as it reuses samples and synths from previous tracks.

Things get off to a fantastic start, though, with Prime 3-D and the wonderfully titled L’Amour and Her Hot-Wired Hands effecting the kind of low-budget sci-fi soundtrack the release may have been aiming for, and sort of easing us in to the lower-key pace of what’s to come. A Glow in the Night slows it down but ups the funk, setting a high standard for what a full-on downtempo Phono Ghosts could sound like. But it’s with Only Us’s repeated vocal samples and simple layers that the project starts to lose steam, continuing on in that fashion until 81 Love adds some quirk back in.

While the general vibe of the release may appeal to PG fans other than myself, I admittedly prefer a bit more bite to be heard. Different sequencing may have livened Warm Pad, Sharp Stab up a bit, but I do hope this was more of an experiment than a sign of the direction Neil is planning on taking future releases.