The Daily Spin, June 16
ODESZA | In Return
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 song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: In Return (2015)
Artist: ODESZA
Link:
From the very beginning, In Return establishes that this is still the ODESZA that people grew to know and love through Summer’s Gone, a spacey sort of sound that persists all through the marching beat of ‘Always This Late’ pairing with a warbling vocal sample, shimmering, glowing, and uplifting.
This is, at heart, the core of what ODESZA did with In Return, and I think they’ve been chasing that high ever since, as they’ve transitioned from the chiller sounds that were so prevalent on their first album into poppier and more bass-heavy efforts. To me, this album strikes a (literally) perfect balance between the two, with enough of a percussive drive to keep the album rolling, but that same sparkling feel that opens up a cavity in your chest.
As indietronica goes, this is a shining example of the big-room contingent of that genre, bass-heavy pounding with vocals that have you desperate to see this act at a festival. Every song strikes at your core, pulling every emotion out of you to scatter it like stars in the night sky, blinking at you from on high.
The way that In Return marries samples and modern production is far and away its greatest strength - while The Avalanches have cultivated a super impressive reputation in their own right through their ability to build entire albums out of essentially nothing but samples, ODESZA push and pull through the two - take ‘Koto’, where an old Turkish couplet is stretched over a violently percussive buildup, right before the bottom falls out entirely and you’re launched into a floating mass of shining sound. ‘Kusanagi’, the slowest track on the album, is three and a half minutes of wading waist-deep in memory. It’s all so tinged with gold and a lustre that can’t be shaken, the sort of thing that evokes sentiments sometimes forgotten.
Through it all, their vocal features astound - double-feature Zyra stuns on ‘Say My Name’ and ‘It’s Only’ in turn, accentuated by deep production that reaches into the abyss to call forward plucking Eastern notes that dart around her sultry vocalizations without ever overtaking them. Moonsiren embodies her name in a song that takes me directly back to late nights on beaches around Malibu, capturing a very specific sort of ennui that I’ll never be able to truly put words to.
That, I think, is In Return to me - it’s more than just an album, because it’s so interwoven with the fabric of who I am. I found this album about a month into my freshman year of college, discovered at the behest of a friend who will never truly know just how impactful she was to who I am and how I’ve developed my own tastes. As I’ve grown, a lot about who I am has changed - eight years down the line, I’m not who I was then, for the better, but one of the constants in my life has been this album. That can never be understated, nor forgotten, and it’s why this album is the third 10/10 that I’ll be awarding.
Rating: 10/10
Best Tracks: Kusanagi; Koto; It’s Only; Always This Late
Worst Tracks: n/a