- 8AM is the first album in five years from Teengirl Fantasy, AKA Logan Takahashi and Nicholas Weiss, who since 2009 have blended pop, R&B and and dance music. In the same way that Oneohtrix Point Never reworked Chris De Burgh's "Lady In Red" on his track "Nobody Here," a track on the artist's Sunsetcorp YouTube page, Weiss and Takahashi had manipulated bits of Rose Royce ("Love Don't Live Here") and Mariah Carey ("Touch My Body") on earlier tracks. Where 2012's Tracer experimented with house and techno, 8AM recalls their debut, 7AM, but with a more refined approach.
The cloak of a night that never ends is suggested in titles like "Crash Soft," "Glare" and "It Was Already Light Out," which linger in the afterglow of ambience and sub-bass grooves. The wobbly tabla rhythm and a recurring three-note hook of "Don't" echo the '90s ethno-electronica of a band like Deep Forest. Churning, wordless vocals slide in and out of each other within a rising build-up in "Wet Eyes And Exhilaration." Album standout "We Out" precedes it with another murmuring, pitched-shifted voice winding around a panning keyboard patch for a brief yet invigorating two minutes.
"Seed" is the only song on 8AM with original lyrics, contributed by New York rapper and producer Khalif Diouf, credited here as Khalif Jones. (He was formerly known as Le1f.) The words trace a new romance unfolding on a night out, reposed on a delicate swell of synths and aspirating beats. “After the club / After the diner / After the taxi / Back to your bedroom,” Diouf moans. On the same song, he sings: "Everything you asked me to forget / Comes to the surface / In this moonlight." Intimate moments like these embody the dreamlike state that makes 8AM so appealing.
Tracklist01. Glare
02. Crash Soft
03. Telepaths
04. We Out
05. It Was Already Light Out
06. Where I Went
07. All Of The Time
08. Star-rise
09. Don't
10. Seeds feat. Khalif Jones
11. En Route
12. Wet Eyes And Exhilaration