- Home listening techno at its finest.
- Anthony Naples has bucked the trend and become a dance music album artist. Usually, the long-player format provides a hurdle for producers like him who started out making dance floor tracks. It's tough to translate club bangers into an album-worthy narrative. It probably helps that the New York artist has approached every one of his LPs quite differently, from the ruddy sketches of Body Pill to the exquisite afterparty jams of Take Me With You. On his last LP, Chameleon, he even made a risky move to guitar-based music and somehow pulled it off.
Naples' secret weapon is his unique mix of modesty, charisma and musicality. His tracks don't necessarily ooze with emotion, but they're just melodic and intriguing enough to make an impact without hitting you over the head. (Just think of that clipped phrase that drove everyone crazy over a whole summer.) It's the way he keeps things close to his chest that makes the more overt displays of feeling even more pronounced. There's a few of those moments on his new LP, Orbs, where this happens—like the downward sweep of "Silas" and its thick bass guitar riff, which sounds more like modern post-punk than techno. Its strummed strings and underwater percussion are baroque but decaying, like a broken-down palace, and it bears more than a little resemblance to Aphex Twin's memorable "remixes" of Nine Inch Nails.
If Naples' last few albums have had a whiff of comedown, Orbs is somewhere before then, locked in the lava lamp glow and mephedrone glaze of a '90s chill out room. "Ackee" has the icy, glitched-out feel of cult IDM artist Arovane, while "Orb Two," with its rippling groove and curlicues of pitch-bent melody, sounds like a dub record warping in the heat of a lovely open air party. Only with "Tito," a lo-fi hip-hop beat to chill/study to, does Naples give in to the languor the rest of the album hints at, but its elegant strings and gentle keyboards are hard to get mad at.
Some sounds from Chameleon reappear, like on the windswept guitar interlude "Gem." Orbs also connects with Naples' past in its ending stretch, where the kick drums come out to play. "Scars" is organ house so sumptuous and silky it feels like it's wrapped in milk chocolate, while "Strobe" buries its pacey kick-hat pattern under layers of gauze. But for the most part, like all of Naples' records, Orbs is of its own world—the Mo' Wax trip-hop worship of "Moto Verse" wouldn't have really belonged anywhere else in his discography.
We often call dance music artists "producers," who "make" tracks rather than "write" songs, and sometimes that's accurate. Anthony Naples' run of albums, including Orbs, shows us that the dichotomy isn't always accurate. He doesn't have to resort to lyrics or liner notes to tell his stories—his writing goes deep into the textures and rhythms of his music, making you feel things before you even realize you're feeling them. Like so many of his other full-lengths, Orbs invites you to sit down and vibe out, enjoy the reverberations of styles familiar and new, and just see what happens.
Tracklist01. Moto Verse
02. Orb Two
03. Morph
04. Silas
05. Gem
06. Ackee
07. Scars
08. Strobe
09. Tito
10. Unknow