The Daily Spin, December 7
Chet Faker | Built on Glass
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite songs from each album right here.
Album: Built on Glass (2014)
Artist: Chet Faker
Link:
Nick Murphy splashed onto the scene in the early 2010s with his cover of Blackstreet’s ‘No Diggity’ - this unknown Australian guy, calling himself Chet Faker, with haunting vocals and the sort of sparse RnB production, all low-ends and muttered whispers, captivating the entire continent of Australia. A follow-up EP with fellow Aussie Flume arrived in 2013, called Lockjaw, trailing his first album, Thinking In Textures, but it was Built on Glass that landed him on my radar.
There’s two halves to this album - literally, as track 7 (‘/’) is a disembodied American Southern man telling you that “now is the time to dig deeper”.
The first half is the Faker that gets the radio play, the saxophone murmuring over basic snap-kick structures and vocal chops that spill into Murphy’s hypnotic vocals on ‘Talk Is Cheap’, or the more energetic ‘Gold’, a track that vaguely pushes at the boundaries of anthemic without ever really making a statement to that effect. Despite that, it’s the best track on the album, the one where Murphy’s vocals make their cleanest landing and all the instrumentals come through just so.
The second half is more fun, maybe, but I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s better - this is where Murphy-as-Faker chooses to get really experimental with it, as though he’s developing the idea of who Chet Faker is on the fly - and though you see a bit of it with ‘1998’ and ‘Cigarettes & Loneliness’, these are also the two tracks likely closest to who Faker has already proven himself to be. ‘1998’ chooses to dabble in house, while Cigarettes is a nearly-eight minute indie journey, Faker proving his artistic chops through a sprawling tune that takes every last moment to develop and grow into itself.
On the whole, it’s an album full of the in-betweens, but Murphy makes it work.
Rating: 8.4/10
Best Tracks: Gold; Talk Is Cheap; Lesson in Patience
Worst Tracks: Dead Body