- Forget Nicolas Jaar's easygoing side—this is tough, military music.
- Did you enjoy how easygoing the 2012-2017 album was? The way Nicolas Jaar, working as Against All Logic, breezily edited disco, house and soul songs for the dance floor? Well, you can now forget all of that—the military has moved in. This seems to be the message from the new Against All Logic material, an all-originals mix Jaar broadcast via NTS this week and Illusions Of Shameless Abundance, this new EP. His request that Against All Logic be represented in the media by "any picture of a military man holding a cellphone" kind of captures the new vibe. This is heavy, strange and commanding music. A little of the original housey warmth and sample work coloured the mix on NTS, but the big takeaway here is that Jaar has refreshed the project by kicking it into the red, something Illusions Of Shameless Abundance makes extremely clear.
"Alucinao" is what happens when this force meets some funk. It features someone called Estado Unido, possibly an alias of Jaar's, and FKA twigs, although it's not clear if she's the heavily treated voice in the track's second half or is working the production desk. Either way, for me this is the best track to come from Against All Logic so far. Its twisted but highly danceable rhythm—which could be dancehall influenced but is hard to place—brings to mind the excellent work Demdike Stare did with the Testpressing series, plus "Alucinao" has added allure of the wailing, distortion-fried vocal performances (Genius will need its finest minds to figure out these lyrics).
A tussle between steadiness and madness defines "Illusions Of Shameless Abundance," a track whose rhythm is at once simple and utterly chaotic. Lydia Lunch, the New York no wave artist who's released an album with Jaar's Other People label, is a bewildering presence, her hard-panned spoken-word tonally matching the beats' toughness and the squalls of noise. We'd come to expect high standards of sonic exploration from Jaar, which meant the last Against All Logic record was, while agreeable, too easily defined. Illusions Of Shameless Abundance is pretty much an antithesis in this respect, opening up a tantalizing range of possibilities for the upcoming album.
TracklistA Illusions Of Shameless Abundance
B Alucinao