Staff Reviews

Nicolas Jaar - Sirens

Review by Eva Mackevic

Messy, pseudo political blandness»

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Sirens is the highly anticipated second full-length LP from Nicolas Jaar, the Chilean-born electronic music producer, mixing engineer and DJ. A prolific artist with a wide palette of talents, Jaar spent his teenage years in dance music circles in New York City, where he now resides. In 2011, he released his debut album, the critically-acclaimed Space is Only Noise, which was one of our Albums Of The Year.
On his 2011 debut album, there was a semblance of a slow club-music pulse, while last year’s Pomegranates consisted of 20 glitched-out instrumental sketches. Sirens is something else again: in just 40 minutes, you’ll hear Suicide’s louche techno-punk (albeit slathered in high-gloss electronica and French lounge jazz), Karl Hyde of Underworld’s dada chants, lashings of Talk Talk, and Phil Collins doing Chilean cumbia. The song structures constantly meander and fragment and often dissolve into silence and drone before reconstituting. You cannot fault Jaar’s preposterous ambition.description from www.roughtrade.com