Lee Jones - Soon EP

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  • Soon is the second of two EPs spotlighting Berlin-resident, Essex boy Lee Jones's debut solo album, Electronic Frank, with the EP's title track appearing both in its album form, and remixed by Canadian producer The Mole. If you're waiting for another slab of pristine beauty like Jones's breakthrough single "Aria," "Soon"'s not going to answer your prayers. Rather, it moves almost 180 degrees, more closely recalling the low-attention-span latticing of detail that characterized Songs for the Gentle, the debut album by My My, Jones's trio with Nick Höppner and Carsten Klemann. But with that change in focus comes different pleasures, and "Soon" works away at the micro level, watching tiny elements—scatty drum rolls, cheesy guitar licks, tooth-scrubbing percussion, trilling piano figures—waltz together in unlikely patterns, like a game of Connect Four pressed to vinyl. The fidgety intricacy of some of "Soon"'s purpler passages recall Akufen's micro-sampling epics, and the way Jones knits together vocals—mostly recordings of a slightly dazed, distracted female sighing the track's title—has them working as punctuation points, with the occasional yelp or grunt popping out from the song's maw. The Mole's remix streamlines all of the original's energy, stripping back the busy and reconstituting the voices, looping vocal inflections into tiny melodic cells and then ping-ponging them across a motorik rhythm. It's good, but Jones's other originals, also from Electronic Frank, are stronger: both "MDMAmazing" and "The Secret" share a strange, uplifting melancholy, unexpectedly reminiscent of a more proactive Carl Craig circa More Songs…. The intricacy is still there—Jones fills both tracks with tiny tics and one-off textural conceits—but it's subservient to the gentle emotional coloration he's aiming for. There's also something of the "astral sublime" in "MDMAmazing"'s pinging, mile-high melodies: trebly and twinkling, they're redolent of the night-sky electronica of Global Communication.
  • Tracklist
      A1 Soon A2 Soon (The Mole's MMD remix) B1 MDMAzing B2 The Secret
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