Newly signed to Brainfeeder, Lapalux, the electronic alias of Essex's Stuart Howard, should have no problem fitting in with his hazily G-funkin' labelmates: warmth and fuzziness emanate from his music, and a typical track sports enough layers for a full album of songs. Where Lapalux departs from, say, FlyLo, then, is a finer point but a palpable one: as foggy as When You're Gone, Lapalux's Brainfeeder debut, can get over its seven tracks, it never fully sounds laid back, as if the producer is unwilling to let his sounds run as rampant or give into the funk quite like his Californian counterparts.
Lapalux's focus, however, isn't necessarily a bad thing; the Brainfeeder aesthetic, indefinable as it's become since the relatively straightforward club sound of Martyn's Ghost People entered the fray, could probably benefit from Lapalux's compositional certitude, and any label is lucky to get its hands on such talent at the controls. "Moments," the set's juicy pop center, recalls mid-decade Machinedrum and Prefuse73 in its merging of IDM sensitivity with R&B smoothness. "Gone," stoned as anything you're likely to find emanating from Los Angeles, conjures an impossibly late night in washes of perfectly textured synths and wildly pitched vocals. But as tracks like "Yellow 90's" and "Gutter Glitter" pile on the elements and effects, you can almost sense Lapalux's CPU load meter creeping dangerously upward, and you may wonder if there's a more eloquent, or at least less tightly managed, way into this sound.
Buy Lapalux - When You're Gone at
  
Tracklist: Lapalux - When You're Gone
 01. 102 Hours of Introductions
02. Moments Feat. PY
03. Gone
04. Yellow 90's
05. Construction Deconstruction
06. Gutter Glitter
07. Face Down, Eyes Shut
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