- A lovely EP that balances club-ready heft with elegant emotion.
- Parris has always made music that feels intimate and inviting. Looking right back to his earliest work on seminal UK labels Tempa (stoned slo-mo dubstep with fellow bass minimalist Wen) and Idle Hands (sumptuously lazy dub techno), his music balances a melodic lightness of touch with a sub-heavy, dance floor-ready robustness. Equally adept at soundtracking daydreams as wiggling feet, his dual talent comes to life as potently as ever on Passionfruit.
On opener "why can't rabbits wear cowboy boots," the opening drum hits and subtly glitched vocals act like a fractal window, expanding slowly to reveal a melancholy fog much denser than on first inspection. Across the remainder of the track, pristine melodies (and melodic fragments) stutter and shimmer, while its drums swell and recede so effortlessly that their complex shifting only solidifies after a couple of deeper listens. It's a testament to the control of atmosphere on Passionfruit that its lengthier arrangements—all but one of its tracks are comfortably over six minutes—capture that quality of a criminally short song you wish was double the length. "Underwater Fantasy" closes out the EP with some of this insouciant swagger, based around a vocal that eventually pitch-shifts whimsically up and down, stretched far beyond the recognisable catchiness of its first half. (This playful tic was most recently deployed on his excellent collaboration with Untold last year.)
Much like Parris's 2021 debut LP, Soaked In Indigo Moonlight, this new EP signals another elegant stylistic shift from an artist with an already beguiling touch. Passionfruit condenses the developed richness of an album into four full-bodied tracks that work just as well on headphones as big sound systems.
Tracklist01. why can't rabbits wear cowboy boots
02. Slipping, Falling, Crawling
03. Passionfruit
04. Underwater Fantasy