Left-field funk producer James Pants came up in his native label Stones Throw on floor-forward tracks cut with a healthy dose of self-awareness. His loose collar electro-funk debut “Welcome” sounds like an (even more) irreverent mixtape, a sly genre roast that sidles just a couple of strides closer to parody than tribute. 2009’s “All The Hits,” an unabashed album of jingles and so-called “library music,” hinted Pants at just how serious Pants was about his meta meditations.
Pants revels in his kitsch fascination on “Savage.” Itap his first foray into whatap been vaporwave, the most recent in a long line of arbitrarily named genres. It sprung from avant-garde musician James Ferraro’s “Far Side Virtual,” a collage of digital audio ephemera from the last twenty-odd years arranged into . The album worked both as a soundtrack to an online shopping spree and a knock to consumer culture, and depending on who you asked, was a crowning achievement or weird nonsense.
“Savage,” on the other hand, is less of a statement than a playful audio adventure. Itap first three tracks—totaling just over four-and-a-half minutes—are its most accessible, a mix of industrial rhythms and loading screen muzak. The triad culminates with “Designated Driver,” the sort of ersatz club banger you’d expect from a SecondLife rave. Through its layers of dog barks, xylophones and dial tones, itap the album’s most coherent single.
From here, itap more or less every track for itself. Some are tranquil (“Spaces”), many others, alarming (“Black” is a convincing take on Shabazz Palaces in panic mode). From piece to piece, it floats from vignettes of campy virtual atmosphere—“Spaces” and especially sound like covers of Jan Hammers’ tunes from —to hastily distilled parodies () at a dizzying pace. No track here exceeds three minutes, and good thing: most of these musical ideas would collapse if they were stretched any longer.
Like “All The Hits,” “Savage” isn’t an album in the traditional sense. There’s little in the way of verse-chorus-bridge here, and is instead akin to hitting scan on the radio in some 80’s primitive VR sim. The tracks are essentially all interstitial bits, and considering its massive mood swings, it’s bound to lose you at some point. But for the post-modern DJ, retro video game producer, or hell, just the chronically curious, “Savage” is a worthy if uneven experiment.
