- OPN's latest album is his most ambitious, overloaded with ideas that shift and twitch seemingly every few seconds.
- Daniel Lopatin suggests his new album Again is an imagined collaboration with his younger self. That explains the guest list: alt-rock lifers like Xiu Xiu, Lee Ranaldo and Jim O'Rourke, whom Lopatin might've tapped for a project like this had he made it in his early 20s. Given Lopatin's long-standing interest in the way people discover and remember formative media, one might expect Again to be a refraction of the music he was listening to around the time: a warped take on noise rock and Chicago post-rock, much like how the "hypergrunge" of Garden Of Delete channeled the music he consumed as a teen in the late '90s.
It's a surprise, then, that Again more closely resembles a '70s prog-rock album than anything else—and not one of the crossover successes like Dark Side Of The Moon or Close To The Edge, but fans-only affairs like Atom Heart Mother or Tales From Topographic Oceans—records that inspire awe by their sheer scale and ambition even if you'd be damned to remember anything that happened on them. This is an album of improbable complexity, dizzying scale and technical virtuosity, spitting an unbelievable amount of content at the listener for the bulk of an hour. There's no way Lopatin expects anyone to pick up everything on their first, second, or even fifth listen, but with each subsequent spin, the experience of listening to Again becomes more and more like staring into your TV screen until it's nothing but indistinct, multicolored dots.
"Elseware" opens on an insectoid buzzing of strings, and it's really the only track that follows one idea all the way through from start to finish. The rest comprise short vignettes that violently shunt each other aside for space. Some of the most beautiful moments in Lopatin's catalogue bump elbows with some of the ugliest, as when "Krumville" opens with a skipping, Oval-like sample before barging into Lopatin's approximation of a post-grunge power ballad. "On An Axis" starts like a lost Eccojam before Lopatin smears it with screaming rave synths that Levon Vincent might find immodest. There's an alarming number of drops, not least on "World Outside," which pairs a halftime drum thwack with the tinniest faux-string patch imaginable. It's as if Lopatin were trying to create a Lindsey Stirling facsimile without even the luxury of a violin.
There are moments on Again where we might swear we're hearing the astral traveler of Returnal and Replica who was able to summon an infinity of feeling with just a few samples and detuned synths. But everything is always scooped up and subsumed into the album's unending stream of mayhem. Sooner or later, the album's stretches of beauty elicit skepticism rather than awe, as no moment of tranquility goes undisturbed for long. After a few listens, the appreciation inspired by its craft gives way to the ordeal of listening to all of this music in sequence.
Counterintuitively, Again could have benefited from being even more indulgent in form and content. Had it been actually allowed to stretch to, say, Tales From Topographic Oceans's 80-plus minutes, each individual idea could've been given more room to breathe, and it might've all added up to a sense of scale and grandeur rather than simply of largeness. And had Lopatin really hammered the listener over the head with bizarre and unfathomable noises rather than simply sticking to his usual palette of uncanny-valley synth and MIDI sounds, he might've saved the album through pure silliness. As it is, it's an album that sounds less extreme than it has any right to, inspiring a cold and technical appreciation for Lopatin's craftsmanship, but not necessarily excitement.
Tracklist01. Elseware
02. Again
03. World Outside
04. Krumville
05. Locrian Midwest
06. Plastic Antique
07. Gray Subviolet
08. The Body Trail
09. Nightmare Paint
10. Memories Of Music
11. On An Axis
12. Ubiquity Road
13. A Barely Lit Path