- Sweeping and sentimental with a subtle streak of bio-horror, more eaze's moving yet eerie new record embraces the entire world in the midst of mounting unease about its future.
- Strawberry Season, Mari Maurice's new album as more eaze, looks for a glimmer of beauty in a world that seems to be expiring, and finds it in sympathy for all living things. This approach to late-capitalist anxiety has less in common with the hyperpop that comprises a good portion of the Austin artist's catalog, and more to do with doleful Y2K-era albums like Grandaddy's The Sophtware Slump or the Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots. Those albums used romantic sweep and boundless empathy—we really felt for Superman or Jed the Humanoid listening to those records—to suspend themselves in the moment a child realizes that the arc of the universe might not always bend towards good.
Maurice claims inspiration in the abundance of seasonal fruits, such as strawberries, that are found in supermarkets year-round. It's a symbol of plenty tainted with unease, reflecting the subtle streak of domestic bio-horror that runs throughout Strawberry Season's compact half-hour. Blanketing nearly every empty space with sweeping strings, filling the margins of the mix with popping bubbles and affectionate R2-D2 beeps, she creates a mood that's melancholy and also kind of cute. The word is neoteny: the quality in childlike things that makes people want to care for them, the principle behind characters like Hello Kitty and songs like Brian Wilson's "Caroline, No," where he pitched up his voice to make his pubescent pleas even more devastating.
The twin pillars of this compact, 27-minute release are the choppy IDM fantasies "Blank Check" and "Cold." "Blank Check" is like a wash of heart emojis, its squeaking synths halfway between a ringtone and a puppy's whine, augmented by pitch-shifted K.K. Slider-style whoa-ohs. "Cold" is built from sounds that could've been sourced from a landline phone or a dial-up modem, and an eager synth at the top of the mix sounds like a little dog running around. The first track, for that matter, is called "Gentle Pets," and canine sounds are hardly new to Maurice's music. Is there a better example of the casually horrifying ways humans shape their everyday environment than the selective breeding of dogs? As cute as they are, it starts to feel a little creepy when you realize they used to be wolves.
Much of Strawberry Season follows in the more ambient vein Maurice has pursued on albums like towards a plane, yearn and oneiric, shot through with field recordings of everyday life. A distant swell of eerie voice-synth rises behind a sample of a supermarket checkout on "Suped." "Known" pairs mournful strings with audio of a running shower, like a "don't waste water" PSA with the narration stripped away. The climax and centerpiece is "Low Resolution At Santikos," named for a Texas theater chain, which junks the Silent Spring paranoia for nine minutes of rosiness.
In spite of its short runtime, Strawberry Season is an impressive showcase of the artist’s range. The ambient collage material is more tactile and evocative than ever, the sound design on the IDM tracks is head-spinning and the one pop song—the softly strummed "Gentle Pets"—is one of her best, thanks in no small part to the lustrous effects slathered on her voice. "Your Call" even hints briefly at the brash hyperpop of her Claire Rousay collaboration Never Stop Texting Me, before a stately violin interrupts.
Maurice and Rousay have called their music "emo ambient" in the past, but Strawberry Season's emotional range vaults well past that half-joking description into what feels like a tearful embrace of the entire world in the midst of mounting unease about its future. Strawberry Season is like an empathy machine for all the poor critters going down with the ship, and it's the most moving and frightening album that more eaze has made yet.
Tracklist01. Gentle Pets
02. Suped
03. Blank Check
04. Known
05. Cold
06. Your Call
07. Low Resolutions At Santikos
08. Goodnight