Los Angeles’ Nicky Benedek and Alex Talan might not stay up to now, however you’ll be able to guess they’ve summer time homes there. Benedek—who in 2011 cited Zapp and Roger Troutman as influences, making him some of the clued-in faculty juniors within the historical past of upper schooling—received his begin making smooth, ’80s-inspired boogie that sounded prefer it had been swiped from the cassette deck of a classic lowrider (one other main affect: West Coast G-funk). When he graduated to a broader amalgam of R&B, new age, freestyle, and deep home, Benedek’s music remained steeped in analog heat and tape hiss. Talan, aka Coolwater, has proven related crate-digging instincts on his NTS present Cool World West, favoring artists like Joe Zawinul, Invoice Laswell, Haruomi Hosono, and likewise Talan’s late father, a filmmaker and bed room synth participant. Coolwater’s eponymous 2020 debut EP feels like a distillation of all these influences, a sort of L.A. jazz noir with a Blade Runner soul. Within the new trio Complete Blue, which incorporates their good friend Anthony Calonico, they dim the lights and ship an much more enchanting simulacrum of outernational jazz and big-budget new age.
The three musicians beforehand labored collectively on Coolwater’s EP, which on reflection appears to be like like a trial run for Complete Blue. Their debut album takes related sounds and influences—fretless bass, muted trumpet, racks of outboard results—and distills them right into a dreamier, extra ethereal fusion. “The Path” opens the report on an aquatic scene: A liquid electrical bass melody glistens like oily water beneath the docks; a mild marimba rhythm clinks like rigging in opposition to sailboat masts. It’s chromatically lush, a feast of augmented chords and burnished accidentals; midway by way of, a keening wind-synthesizer melody carries the music to its logical smooth-jazz conclusion. “Corsair” picks up each the maritime metaphor and the retro sensibility: The whole lot, from the flanged guitar to the LinnDrum thwacks, appears designed to evoke a selected period and spirit of digitally abetted jazz manufacturing. Again in its heyday, this was an costly sound to create; Complete Blue pay tribute to these studio payments of yore with luxurious chords and preparations that sound like one million bucks.
For those who didn’t know the backstory, it might be straightforward to imagine from the album’s glistening sheen that it was a reissue of an ’80s new-age relic. Even the evocative, globe-trotting titles sound like one thing from a Windham Hill or Personal Music laserdisc: “Coronary heart of the World,” “Chaparral,” “Jaguarundi.” It’s not simply the sound design that feels opulent; so do the songs themselves, which stretch out with an virtually extravagant sense of leisure, bass glissando and ersatz reeds mirroring one another in gradual, sensuous motions. Irrespective of what number of instances I’ve listened, each time the trio pivots to a very juicy chord, it appears like triple cherries developing on the slot machine.
