- Soft-focus but challenging ambient music from one of the genre's most intriguing producers.
- It's a stretch for Ulla Straus to call the first track on her new album "song," but you can see what she means. Her new album Foam departs from the thick chords and crackling textures that've made her music some of the most interesting to emerge from the Midwestern ambient scene revolving around labels like Lillerne, West Mineral and C minus. Instead, this surprise release on 3XL embraces fingerstyle guitars and clipped vocal samples that burst forward in wordless peals of anguish. Throughout the record, the Philly-via-Kansas artist seems allergic to anything that would allow the listener to float away and ignore what's going on for even a second. Instead, it's an intense record that sometimes seems like it wants to hurt the listener.
It's hard to overstate how extreme the dynamic contrasts are on this record. Most of these 14 short tracks are built on squishy textures and low drones, but any moments of quietude are shattered by piercing hiccups and shocking blasts of distortion. This isn't like grunge or brostep (though "gloss" sounds a bit like Skrillex's "With You, Friends") where the quiet moments are just a pitstop on the way to speaker-wrecking climaxes. This is a barefoot walk over sharp rocks, an arduous journey that can feel purifying in the right mindset and unbearable in the wrong one. But after a while, it becomes easy to get lost in. Because the music keeps interrupting itself, the divisions between tracks become just another rupture, until the album ends mid-sentence at a point that seems both totally arbitrary and completely right.
At times Foam sounds like a singer-songwriter album shattered into a million pieces, or the amplified noodling of an idle garage practice session recorded and chopped up into new forms. Shrouded in brambles of guitar, intent on continually interrupting itself, Foam is spontaneous and unpredictable in a way that runs counter to the linear drift of previous Ulla albums like Tumbling Towards a Wall or Limitless Frame. It's the closest thing she’s done to a rock album, with a looseness and spontaneity that suggests a live band even as most of its sounds are plainly electronic.
This is rough, rugged stuff, yet somehow it seems like the Ulla LP most likely to lift her out of ambient cult fandom and into the consciousness of people who exalt things like Frank Ocean, Drain Gang or the most chipmunked-out Alex G recordings. It's too abstract to betray any reason for its intensity, but its pervasive and undefined melancholy might strike a chord with anyone who doesn't know what to be sad about because there are simply too many things to be sad about. This isn't an album that transports you to another world: just like reality, it keeps you on your feet.
Tracklist01. song
02. gloss
03. popping out
04. marina
05. creepy girl
06. sad face
07. indoor type
08. blush
09. for your love
10. scrubby
11. 11
12. egg
13. macys
14. foam ange