- Gonno's second full-length, Remember The Life Is Beautiful, lives up to its name. It gushes with starry-eyed house and Balearic flourish, but not in spurts of flat optimism—it has complexity, diversity, eccentricity and depth. Scan the tracklist: "The Worst Day Ever" seems to conquer the doldrums through mental levitation, "Confusion"'s disorienting movement and steady pulse reflect chaos in a bustling city and "The Island I've Never Been" plays like a vision of far-off escapes from civilization. In its freeform composition and effortless drift, "Already Almost" seems to praise the poetry of happenstance. Simply put, when Gonno weaves together tapestries of lush synth, delicate guitar, cheery rhythms and unknown field recordings, he makes every high and low point sound like a celebration.
Remember The Life Is Beautiful also has its lulls in excitement, though it never slips into tedium. Rarely do the tracks clock in below five minutes, and Gonno readily coasts on a drum pattern or melodic sequence. He bides his time, but does so to, say, accentuate the impact of an incoming harmony or tease a bassline's imminent arrival. And most songs are richly kaleidoscopic enough that taking a moment to hear it swirl in place is a pleasure of patience. Despite the subterranean thrust of "Stop" and the spacey disco roller "Revoked," Gonno doesn't reprise floor-fillers like "ACDise #2." Instead, he leans harder into the sprawl of "A Life With Clarinet" from earlier this year.
This is dance music for daydreamers, and as such, it can wander off on occasion. "Stop," for instance, meditates on a dark techno milieu that sounds most like Jon Hopkins and unlike anything else in the tracklist. Its arrival early on (track three) turns from curiosity to outlier when Remember The Life Is Beautiful fails to ever visit that space again. "Across The Sadness" does a better job with those colder shades, giving its lively house rhythms and synthy twinkle the tint of shoegaze guitar bends. In contrast, when "Green Days" wraps things up, the grinning ditty could seem to undermine the vibrant soul of its predecessors, and yet works more like a warm send off. An entire album of the stuff would likely be twee overkill, but Gonno's endearing quirks and lighthearted sensibilities are charming in small doses.
Tracklist01. Hippies
02. The Worst Day Ever
03. Stop (Album Version)
04. Confusion
05. Beasts In Your Mind
06. Across The Sadness (Album Version)
07. Already Almost
08. Revoked
09. The Island I've Never Been
10. Green Days