Western Water Music Vol. II

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Total Tracks: 12   Total Length: 47:02

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Hua Hsu

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Hua Hsu edits the hip-hop section of URB Magazine and writes about music, culture and politics for Slate, the Village Voice, The Wire and various other magazine...more »

05.05.08
Nobody channels the Cocteau Twins for this haunting meditation on the apocalypse.
Label: Ubiquity Records

California contains multitudes: hippies and Hell's Angels, pro-recycling proselytizers and five-lane highways, the melting pot and the Manson Family, a placid, mono-seasonal calm and the constant threat of earthquakes. Over the course of his career, Los Angeles producer Nobody (known to his mother as Elvin Esetla) has explored the tense fault-lines that crisscross beneath the paradise image of his home state, often to eerily beautiful results. In 2003, he released Pacific Drift: Western Water Music, Vol. 1, a romantic, cut-and-paste tribute to the tranquility of the California coastline, and the lovely Tree Colored See, a collaborative soft-psych album he recorded with Mystic Chords of Memory, followed in 2006.

Western Water Music, Vol. II is a far less optimistic view of life out west. Estela claims that the concept came to him when he suffered a nightmare in which a massive earthquake severs the West Coast from the rest of the United States, resulting in killer whirlpools, poisonous mushrooms and a weirdly hopeful, Atlantis-like future. But this isn't a very dystopian-sounding album — ominous, maybe. “Circle in Circles” inches along with flickering acoustic guitars and the hypnotic rhythm of shifting desert sands, while “Ignite” is a tantalizing marriage of… read more »

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Experimental DJ and producer Nobody has long established his ability to work with a variety of different artists. He’s collaborated with rappers and remixed songs for all sorts of bands, and so his transition to working with singers in 2003 with Pacific Drift: Western Water Music, Vol. 1, proved to be seamless enough. In 2008, for the second volume, Nobody decided to have only one vocalist, Niki Randa, a colleague of his from the same Long Beach record store. The result, Western Water Music, Vol. II, is a conceptual album based around the idea of a giant flood that sinks California, and the instrumental arrangements do a good job of reflecting this, bending and swelling and retreating like the water they’re inspired by. This is not a destructive, terrifying flood; instead, it’s one that envelopes and calms and changes, and this kind of mystical quality is heard in the intricately layered guitars and keys, the swirling percussion and samples, the whole thing very ethereal, very lush and lovely with only the occasional hints of unrest, like the spacey “Blank Blue,” the minor chords of “The Spectral Company,” the brooding, Afro-beat-inspired rhythm section. It’s this subtlety that makes the music intoxicating, alluring, but unfortunately, Randa does not have the same effect. While she certainly has a nice voice — smooth and clean and very professional — she isn’t quite able to convey the degrees of emotion that the subject matter necessitates. Her words — those that can be picked out — are revealing but cryptic, bordering on the edge of cheesy (“The sea is calm now, you are of the water folk now,” she sings in the redemptive “Sea Roars Lead”), but she can’t quite back up the ideas. It’s too soothing, too nice, too clean, and while these adjectives all have their place, their domination dampens the album’s overall feeling and almost becomes an irritant, and makes Western Water Music, Vol. II feel more like an overflowing bathtub than an overpowering, species-changing flood. – Marisa Brown

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