3 out of 5

Label: Analogical Force

Produced by: Jeremy Cohen

I criticize some modern electronic music – and select other genres – when it sounds retro without iteration. Casting back to some classic 90s slices of ambient, acid, or glitch is all well and good, but a lot of that stuff was arguably already a little stale back in its heyday when you’d stumble across a various artists comp stuck at the end of the CD section in your local mall store: “oh,” you’d think, “Black Dog is on here,” or some other known quantity, and you come away from the collection of 20+ tracks with maybe only one other artist to pursue.

This is obviously a very specific memory, so I’ll share another piece of it: back when I worked at one of those local mall stores, we sold a lot of those comps. Which means that either everyone was walking away with that same experience, or I had / have more discerning tastes, or… maybe I’m not hearing the nuance.

I’m very willing to allow for the latter when I tell you that The 89th Passenger’s Hidden Soul EP reminds me exactly of the “extras” on those (to me) milquetoast acid / ambient comps from way back when, which tended to bore me with fairly flat production, and completely predictable song progressions – the ambient version of repeat-the-beat club music. There are some rather egregious offenders in that regard here, trawling through Warp-lite territory (i.e. watered down Aphex’s first ambient collection) on opener Paper Wings, or Eren, as unambitious compositions and shallow production do exactly what you’d expect them to do for 3-4 minutes. That made me all set to knock this down as a pretty trivial release, and say something critically of the same effect as above – i.e. if you haven’t heard this stuff before, it’s a pretty spot-on mimic, but mimicking bog-standard stuff is a questionable pursuit – but then… I started to hear something. In the title track, and followup What It Takes to Fly, 89th Passenger (Jeremy Cohen) is fiddling somewhere way in the background with these very analog sounding elements; little nudges of warmth, or puzzling burbles of percussion / synths. It’s low in the mix, and really only exists as the slightest hint of the ‘constantly shifting landscape’ the media copy suggests, but admittedly, the more I listened to it, the more curious it made me why Cohen wasn’t trying to play this duality up more, because it’s interesting, albeit, y’know, not taken advantage of very much.

Thankfully, we end on the high note: Analog Serenade does exactly as asked, pushing a more modern, loose low-end via the burbling beat, while flatter synths do the deed on top, slickly smushing together different approaches towards the same acid-sprinkled ambient vibes. That tops interesting to become a legit standout worth repeating, and makes me curious as to what The 89th Passenger may produce next.