- The perfect afterparty album.
- You've left the club a little early, and it's cold outside. The sun won't be up for a few hours. You take a cab to a friend's place, "Just for an hour or two." You have a drink, a smoke, whatever else, and you keep the club vibes going for a while. The conversation becomes more serious, reflective. You begin to open up. Minds are a little muddled and tiredness is setting in, but everyone feels connected. It's this sort of moment that Take Me With You, the second album from Anthony Naples, seems made for.
The record is a combination of afterparty-friendly styles—ambient, dub, synth music—rolled into 12 blissed-out tracks. These are styles that Naples, who's been releasing music out of New York since 2012, has written before, but never with such depth and focus. (His last album, 2015's Body Pill, didn't feature too many beats but was a lot livelier.) Naples doesn't totally leave behind the warm and dusty club tracks he's most widely known for. "Goodness" eventually pairs its arresting dub bassline with a kick drum. "Love Loop To Fade" sounds like The Other People Place. If you pick up the album's cassette version, "Shredder" opens the B-side with a powerful synth and a rattling beat. But these are just the fleeting sparks of energy an afterparty needs to sustain itself.
The rest of the album sinks into the sofa, often with the help of dub's production values. Tape delays spin off synths into the distance. Basslines, when they appear, oscillate in the depths of the frequency range. The whole thing is gently degraded, adding to the album's worn-in feel. Naples also borrows heavily from '70s German styles such as kosmische and krautrock. In some of the pioneering records from those scenes, you can sense how mesmerised the musicians were by their synthesisers, a sort of wide-eyed quality that tracks like "Spiral" and "Worldwide" share. This simplicity is a salve for weary brains.
The album doesn't try to rewrite any of these styles, or the chill-out record generally, but instead finds Naples casually imitating artists and genres he likes. (He lists Space, Panda Bear, Suzanne Ciani and Holger Czukay as influences.) There's seemingly no self-applied pressure to innovate. It's more about celebrating the originals. When you also consider the album's relatively low-key release through the French label Good Morning Tapes, its retro artwork from the designer Biscuit, and the fact that Naples began the project as a DJ mixtape for his friends, you wind up with an extremely intimate and inviting album.
Tracklist01. Alto
02. Goodness
03. Drifter
04. Spiral
05. Tango
06. 365
07. Shredder
08. El Portal Pt. II
09. Love Loop To Fade
10. Worldwide
11. Things Will Never B Tha Same
12. Take Me With You